t\)t 


The  American  Mind 

Park-Street  Papers 

John  Greenleaf  Whittier :  A  Memoir 

Walt  Whitman 

The  Amateur  Spirit 

A  Study  of  Prose  Fiction 

The  Powers  at  Play 

The  Plated  City 

Salem   Kittredge  and  Other  Stories 

The  Broughton  House 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

The  E.  T.  Earl  Lectures 
1912 


The  American  Mind 


By  Bliss  ferry 


Boston  and  New  York 

Houghton  Mifflin  Company 

1912 


•pf 


COPYRIGHT,   1912,   BY   BLISS  PERRY 
ALL  RIGHTS  RESERVED 

Published  October  zqia 


TO 

WALTER   MORRIS   HART 


250630 


Preface 

THE  material  for  this  book  was  delivered  as 
the  E.  T.  Earl  Lectures  for  1912  at  the  Pacific 
Theological  Seminary ,  Berkeley,  California,  and 
I  wish  to  take  this  opportunity  to  express  to  the 
President  and  Faculty  of  that  institution  my  ap 
preciation  of  their  generous  hospitality. 

The  lectures  were  also  given  at  the  Lowell 
Institute,  Boston,  the  Brooklyn  Institute,  and 
elsewhere,  under  the  title  "American  Traits  in 
American  Literature."  In  revising  them  for  pub 
lication  a  briefer  title  has  seemed  desirable,  and 
I  have  therefore  availed  myself  of  Jefferson  s 
phrase  "The  American  Mind"  as  suggesting, 
more  accurately  perhaps  than  the  original  title, 
the  real  theme  of  discussion. 

B.  P. 

CAMBRIDGE,  1912. 


Contents 

I.  RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK          .  .           3 

II.  THE  AMERICAN  MIND           .  .         •     47 

III.  AMERICAN  IDEALISM  ...         86 

IV.  ROMANCE  AND  REACTION       .  .         .128 
V.  HUMOR  AND  SATIRE.          .         .  .166 

VI.  INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP  .         .  209 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 


Race,  Nation,  and  Book 

MANY  years  ago,  as  a  student  in  a  foreign  uni 
versity,  I  remember  attacking,  with  the  com 
placency  of  youth,  a  German  history  of  the 
English  drama,  in  six  volumes.  I  lost  courage 
long  before  the  author  reached  the  age  of  Eliz 
abeth,  but  I  still  recall  the  subject  of  the  opening 
chapter :  it  was  devoted  to  the  physical  geography 
of  Great  Britain.  Writing,  as  the  good  German 
professordid,inthe  triumphant  hour  of  Taine's 
theory  as  to  the  significance  of  place,  period, 
and  environment  in  determining  the  character 
of  any  literary  production,  what  could  be  more 
logical  than  to  begin  at  the  beginning  ?  Have 
not  the  chalk  cliffs  guarding  the  southern  coast 
of  England,  have  not  the  fatness  of  the  midland 
counties  and  the  soft  rainy  climate  of  a  North 
Atlantic  island,  and  the  proud,  tenacious,  self- 
assertive  folk  that  are  bred  there,  all  left  their 
trace  upon  A  Midsummer  Night's  Dream,  and 

[3] 


::/:  >•:";/."  jT|ij&  AMERICAN  MIND 

Every  Man  in  bis  Humour  and  She  Stoops  to  Con 
quer?  Undoubtedly.  Latitude  and  longitude, 
soil  and  rainfall  and  food-supply,  racial  origins 
and  crossings,  political  and  social  and  economic 
conditions,  must  assuredly  leave  their  marks 
upon  the  mental  and  artistic  productiveness  of 
a  people  and  upon  the  personality  of  individual 
writers. 

Taine,who  delighted  to  point  out  all  this,  and 
whose  English  Literature  remains  a  monument 
of  the  defects  as  well  as  of  the  advantages  of 
his  method,  was  of  course  not  the  inventor  of 
the  climatic  theory.  It  is  older  than  Aristotle, 
who  discusses  it  in  his  treatise  on  Politics.  It 
was  a  topic  of  interest  to  the  scholars  of  the  Re 
naissance.  Englishmen  of  the  seventeenth  cent 
ury,  with  an  unction  of  pseudo-science  added  to 
their  natural  patriotism,  discovered  in  the  Eng 
lish  climate  one  of  the  reasons  of  England's 
greatness.  Thomas  Sprat,  writing  in  1667  on 
the  History  of  the  Royal  Society,  waxes  bold  and 
asserts :  "If  there  can  be  a  true  character  given 
of  the  Universal  Temper  of  any  Nation  under 
Heaven,  then  certainly  this  must  be  ascribed 
to  our  countrymen,  that  they  have  commonly 
an  unaffected  sincerity,  that  they  love  to  de- 

[4] 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

liver  their  minds  with  a  sound  simplicity,  that 
they  have  the  middle  qualities  between  the  re 
served,  subtle  southern  and  the  rough,  unhewn 
northern  people,  that  they  are  not  extremely 
prone  to  speak,  that  they  are  more  concerned 
what  others  will  think  of  the  strength  than  of 
the  fineness  of  what  they  say,  and  that  a  uni 
versal  modesty  possesses  them.  These  qualities 
are  so  conspicuous  and  proper  to  the  soil  that 
we  often  hear  them  objected  to  us  by  some  of 
our  neighbor  Satyrists  in  more  disgraceful  ex 
pressions.  .  .  .  Even  the  position  of  our  cli 
mate,  the  air,  the  influence  of  the  heaven,  the 
composition  of  the  English  blood,  as  well  as  the 
embraces  of  the  Ocean,  seem  to  join  with  the 
labours  of  the  Royal  Society  to  render  our  coun 
try  a  Land  of  Experimental  Knowledge.'* 

The  excellent  Sprat  was  the  friend  and  exec 
utor  of  the  poet  Cowley,  who  has  in  the  Preface 
to  his  Poems  a  charming  passage  about  the  rela 
tion  of  literature  to  the  external  circumstances 
in  which  it  is  written. 

"  If  wit  be  such  a  Plant  that  it  scarce  receives 
heat  enough  to  keep  it  alive  even  in  the  summer 
of  our  cold  Clymate^  how  can  it  choose  but  wither 
in  a  long  and  a  sharp  winter  ?  a  warlike,  various 

[  5] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

and  a  tragical  age  is  best  to  write  of,  but  worst 
to  write  in"  And  he  adds  this,  concerning  his 
own  art  of  poetry  :  "There  is  nothing  that  re 
quires  so  much  serenity  and  chearfulness  of 
spirit;  it  must  not  be  either  overwhelmed  with 
the  cares  of  Life,  or  overcast  with  the  Clouds  of 
Melancholy  and  Sorrow,  or  shaken  and  disturbed 
with  the  storms  of  injurious  Fortune ;  it  must, 
like  the  Halcyon,  have  fair  weather  to  breed  in. 
The  Soul  must  be  filled  with  bright  and  delight 
ful  Idaeas,  when  it  undertakes  to  communicate 
delight  to  others,  which  is  the  main  end  ofPoe- 
sie.  One  may  see  through  the  stile  of  Ovid  de 
*Trist.,  the  humbled  and  dejected  condition  of 
Spirit  with  which  he  wrote  it ;  there  scarce  re 
mains  any  footstep  of  that  Genius,  £)uem  nee 
Jovis  ira,  nee  ignes,  etc.  The  cold  of  the  coun 
try  has  strucken  through  all  his  faculties,  and 
benummed  the  very  feet  of  his  Verses" 

Madame  de  StaeTs  Germany,  one  of  the  most 
famous  ofthe"  national  character  "  books,  begins 
with  a  description  of  the  German  landscape. 
But  though  nobody,  from  Ovid  in  exile  down 
to  Madame  de  Stael,  questions  the  general  sig 
nificance  of  place,  time,  and  circumstances  as 
affecting  the  nature  of  a  literary  product,  when 

[6] 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

we  come  to  the  exact  and  as  it  were  mathemati 
cal  demonstration  of  the  precise  workings  of 
these  physical  influences,  our  generation  is  dis 
tinctly  more  cautious  than  were  the  literary  crit 
ics  of  forty  years  ago.  Indeed,  it  is  a  hundred 
years  since  Fisher  Ames,  ridiculing  the  theory 
that  climate  acts  directly  upon  literary  products, 
said  wittily  of  Greece  :  "  The  figs  are  as  fine  as 
ever,  but  where  are  the  Pindars  ?"  The  theory 
of  race,  in  particular,  has  been  sharply  ques 
tioned  by  the  experts.  "  Saxon  "  and  "  Norman," 
for  example,  no  longer  seem  to  us  such  simple 
terms  as  sufficed  for  the  purpose  of  Scott's  Ivan- 
hoe  or  of  Thierry's  Norman  Conquest,  a  book 
inspired  by  Scott's  romance.  The  late  Profes 
sor  Freeman,  with  characteristic  bluntness, 
remarked  of  the  latter  book  :  "  Thierry  says  at 
the  end  of  his  work  that  there  are  no  longer  ei 
ther  Normans  or  Saxons  except  in  history.  .  . . 
But  in  Thierry's  sense  of  the  word,  it  would 
be  truer  to  say  that  there  never  were  c  Nor 
mans  '  or c  Saxons '  anywhere,  save  in  the  pages 
of  romances  like  his  own." 

There  is  a  brutal  directness  about  this  ver 
dict  upon  a  rival  historian  which  we  shall  pro 
bably  persist  in  calling  "  Saxon  " ;  but  it  is  no 

[7] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

worse  than  the  criticisms  of  Matthew  Arnold's 
essay  on  "The  Celtic  Spirit"  made  to-day  by 
university  professors  who  happen  to  know 
Old  Irish  at  first  hand,  and  consequently  con 
sider  Arnold's  opinion  on  Celtic  matters  to  be 
hopelessly  amateurish. 

The  wiser  scepticism  of  our  day  concerning 
all  hard-and-fast  racial  distinctions  has  been  ad 
mirably  summed  up  by  Josiah  Royce.  "A race 
psychology,"  he  declares,  "  is  still  a  science  for 
the  future  to  discover.  .  .  .  We  do  not  scien 
tifically  know  what  the  true  racial  varieties  of 
mental  type  really  are.  No  doubt  there  are  such 
varieties.  The  judgment  day,  or  the  science  of 
the  future,  may  demonstrate  what  they  are.  We 
are  at  present  very  ignorant  regarding  the  whole 
matter." 

Nowhere  have  the  extravagances  of  the  ap 
plication  of  racial  theories  to  intellectual  pro 
ducts  been  more  pronounced  than  in  the  fields 
of  art  and  literature.  Audiences  listen  to  a  waltz 
which  the  programme  declares  to  be  an  adapta 
tion  of  a  Hungarian  folk-song,  and  though  they 
may  be  more  ignorant  of  Hungary  than  Shake 
speare  was  of  Bohemia,  they  have  no  hesitation 
in  exclaiming  :  "  How  truly  Hungarian  this 

[8] 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

is  !  "  Or,  it  may  be,  how  truly  <c  Japanese  "  is 
this  vase  which  was  made  in  Japan  —  perhaps 
for  the  American  market;  or  how  intensely 
"  Russian  "  is  this  melancholy  tale  by  Turge- 
nieff.  This  prompt  deduction  of  racial  qualities 
from  works  of  art  which  themselves  give  the 
critic  all  the  information  he  possesses  about  the 
races  in  question,  —  or,  in  other  words,  the  en 
thusiastic  assertion  that  a  thing  is  like  itself, — 
is  one  of  the  familiar  notes  of  amateur  criticism. 
It  is  travelling  in  a  circle,  and  the  corregiosity 
of  Corregio  is  the  next  station. 

Blood  tells,  no  doubt,  and  a  masterpiece  us 
ually  betrays  some  token  of  the  place  and  hour 
of  its  birth.  A  knowledge  of  the  condition  of 
political  parties  in  Athens  in  416  B.C.  adds  im 
mensely  to  the  enjoyment  of  the  readers  of  Aris 
tophanes  ;  the  fun  becomes  funnier  and  the  dar 
ing  even  more  splendid  than  before.  Moliere's 
training  as  an  actor  does  affect  the  dramaturgic 
quality  of  his  comedies.  All  this  is  demonstra 
ble,  and  to  the  prevalent  consciousness  of  it  our 
generation  is  deeply  indebted  to  Taine  and  his 
pupils.  But  before  displaying  dogmatically  the 
inevitable  brandings  of  racial  and  national  traits 
on  a  national  literature,  before  pointing  to  this 

[9] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

and  that  unmistakable  evidence  of  local  or  tem 
poral  influence  on  the  form  or  spirit  of  a  master 
piece,  we  are  now  inclined  to  make  some  distinct 
reservations.  These  reservations  are  not  with 
out  bearing  upon  our  own  literature  in  America. 

There  are,  for  instance,  certain  artists  who 
seem  to  escape  the  influences  of  the  time-spirit. 
The  most  familiar  example  is  that  of  Keats.  He 
can  no  doubt  be  assigned  to  the  George  the 
Fourth  period  by  a  critical  examination  of  his 
vocabulary,  but  the  characteristic  political  and 
social  movements  of  that  epoch  in  England  left 
him  almost  untouched.  Edgar  Allan  Foe  might 
have  written  some  of  his  tales  in  the  seventeenth 
century  or  in  the  twentieth;  he  might,  like 
Robert  Louis  Stevenson,  have  written  in  Samoa 
rather  than  in  the  Baltimore,  Philadelphia,  or 
New  York  of  his  day ;  his  description  of  the 
Ragged  Mountains  of  Virginia,  within  very 
sight  of  the  university  which  he  attended,  was 
borrowed,  in  the  good  old  convenient  fashion, 
from  Macaulay  ;  in  fact,  it  requires  something 
of  Poe's  own  ingenuity  to  find  in  Poe,  who  is 
one  of  the  indubitable  assets  of  American  liter 
ature,  anything  distinctly  American. 

Wholly  aside  from  such  spiritual  insulation 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

of  the  single  writer,  there  is  the  obvious  fact 
that  none  of  the  arts,  not  even  literature,  and 
not  all  of  them  together,  can  furnish  a  wholly 
adequate  representation  of  racial  or  national 
characteristics.  It  is  well  known  to-day  that  the 
so-called  " classic  "  examples  of  Greek  art,  most 
of  which  were  brought  to  light  and  discoursed 
upon  by  critics  from  two  to  four  centuries  ago, 
represent  but  a  single  phase  of  Greek  feeling; 
and  that  the  Greeks,  even  in  what  we  choose  to 
call  their  most  characteristic  period,  had  a  dis 
tinctly  "romantic"  tendency  which  their  more 
recently  discovered  plastic  art  betrays.  But  even 
if  we  had  all  the  lost  statues,  plays,  poems,  and 
orations,  all  the  Greek  paintings  about  which 
we  know  so  little,  and  the  Greek  music  about 
which  we  know  still  less,  does  anybody  suppose 
that  this  wealth  of  artistic  expression  would  fur 
nish  a  wholly  satisfactory  notion  of  the  racial 
and  psychological  traits  of  the  Greek  people  ? 
One  may  go  even  further.  Does  a  truly 
national  art  exist  anywhere,  —  an  art,  that  is  to 
say,  which  conveys  a  trustworthy  and  adequate 
expression  of  the  national  temper  as  a  whole  ? 
We  have  but  to  reflect  upon  the  European  and 
American  judgments,  during  the  last  thirty 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

years,  concerning  the  representative  quality  of 
the  art  of  Japan,  and  to  observe  how  many  of 
those  facile  generalizations  about  the  Japanese 
character,  deduced  from  vases  and  prints  and 
enamel,  were  smashed  to  pieces  by  the  Russo- 
Japanese  War.  This  may  illustrate  the  blun 
ders  of  foreign  criticism,  perhaps,  rather  than 
any  inadequacy  in  the  racially  representative 
character  of  Japanese  art.  But  it  is  impossible 
that  critics,  and  artists  themselves,  should  not 
err,  in  the  conscious  endeavor  to  pronounce 
upon  the  infinitely  complex  materials  with  which 
they  are  called  upon  to  deal.  We  must  confess 
that  the  expression  of  racial  and  national  char 
acteristics,  by  means  of  only  one  art,  such  as  lit 
erature,  or  by  all  the  arts  together,  is  at  best  im 
perfect,  and  is  always  likely  to  be  misleading 
unless  corroborated  by  other  evidence. 

For  it  is  to  be  remembered  that  in  literature, 
as  in  the  other  fields  of  artistic  activity,  we  are 
dealing  with  the  question  of  form  ;  of  securing 
a  concrete  and  pleasurable  embodiment  of  cer 
tain  emotions.  It  may  well  happen  that  litera 
ture  not  merely  fails  to  give  an  adequate  report 
of  the  racial  or  national  or  personal  emotions 
felt  during  a  given  epoch,  but  that  it  fails  to  re- 

[  i*] 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

port  these  emotions  at  all.  Not  only  the  "old, 
unhappy,  far-off"  things  of  racial  experience, 
but  the  new  and  delight-giving  experiences  of 
the  hour,  may  lack  their  poet.  Widespread 
moods  of  public  elation  or  wistfulness  or  de 
pression  have  passed  without  leaving  a  shadow 
upon  the  mirror  of  art.  There  was  no  one  to 
hold  the  mirror  or  even  to  fashion  it.  No  note 
of  Renaissance  criticism,  whether  in  Italy, 
France,  or  England,  is  more  striking,  and  in  a 
way  more  touching,  than  the  universal  feeling 
that  in  the  rediscovery  of  the  classics  men  had 
found  at  last  the  "  terms  of  art,"  the  rules  and 
methods  of  a  game  which  they  had  longwished 
to  be  playing.  Englishmen  and  Frenchmen  of 
the  sixteenth  century  will  not  allow  that  their 
powers  are  less  virile,  their  emotions  less  eager, 
than  those  of  the  Greeks  and  Romans.  Only, 
lacking  the  very  terms  of  art,  they  had  tfot  been 
able  to  arrive  at  fit  expression ;  the  soul  had 
found  no  body  wherewith  to  clothe  itself  into 
beauty.  As  they  avowed  in  all  simplicity,  they 
needed  schoolmasters  ;  the  discipline  of  Aris 
totle  and  Horace  and  Virgil ;  a  body  of  critical 
doctrine,  to  teach  them  how  to  express  the 
France  and  England  or  Italy  of  their  day,  and 

' 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

thus  give  permanence  to  their  fleeting  vision  of 
the  world.  Naive  as  may  have  been  the  Renais 
sance  expression  of  this  need  of  formal  training, 
blind  as  it  frequently  was  to  the  beauty  which 
we  recognize  in  the  undisciplined  vernacular  lit 
eratures  of  mediaeval  Europe,  those  groping 
scholars  were  essentially  right.  No  one  can 
paint  or  compose  by  nature.  One  must  slowly 
master  an  art  of  expression. 

Now  through  long  periods  of  time,  and  over 
many  vast  stretches  of  territory,  as  our  own 
American  writing  abundantly  witnesses,  the 
whole  formal  side  of  expression  may  be  ne 
glected.  "  Literature,"  in  its  narrower  sense, 
may  not  exist.  In  that  restricted  and  higher 
meaning  of  the  term,  literature  has  always  been 
uncommon  enough,  even  in  Athens  or  Flor 
ence.  It  demands  not  merely  personal  distinc 
tion  or  power,  not  merely  some  uncommon 
height  or  depth  or  breadth  of  capacity  and  in 
sight,  but  a  purely  artistic  training,  which  in  the 
very  nature  of  the  case  is  rare.  M  illions  of  Rus 
sians,  perhaps,  have  felt  about  the  general  pro 
blems  of  life  much  as  Turgenieff  felt,  but  they 
lacked  the  sheer  literary  art  with  which  the 
Notes  of  a  Sportsman  was  written.  Thousands  of 

[  H] 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

frontier  lawyers  and  politicians  shared  Lincoln's 
hard  and  varied  and  admirable  training  in  the 
mastery  of  speech,  but  in  his  hands  alone  was 
the  weapon  wrought  to  such  perfection  of  tem 
per  and  weight  and  edge  that  he  spoke  and 
wrote  literature  without  knowing  it. 

Such  considerations  belong,  I  am  aware,  to 
the  accepted  commonplaces, — perhaps  to  what 
William  James  used  to  call  "the  unprofitable 
delineation  of  the  obvious."  Every  body  recog 
nizes  that  literary  gifts  imply  an  exceptionally 
rich  development  of  general  human  capacities, 
together  with  a  professional  aptitude  and  train- 
ing  of  which  but  few  men  are  capable.  There  is 
but  one  lumberman  in  camp  who  can  play  the 
riddle,  though  the  whole  camp  can  dance.  Thus 
the  great  book,  we  are  forever  saying,  is  truly 
representative  of  myriads  of  minds  in  a  certain 
degree  of  culture,  although  but  one  man  could 
have  written  it.  The  writing  member  of  a  fam 
ily  is  often  the  one  who  acquires  notoriety  and 
a  bank  account,  but  he  is  likely  to  have  can 
did  friends  who  admit,  though  not  always  in  his 
presence,  that,  aside  from  this  one  professional 
gift  and  practice,  he  is  not  intellectually  or  emo 
tionally  or  spiritually  superior  to  his  brothers 

[  'si 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

and  sisters.  Waldo  Emerson  thought  him 
self  the  intellectual  inferior  of  his  brother 
Charles  ;  and  good  observers  loved  to  maintain 
that  John  Holmes  was  wittier  than  Oliver 
Wendell,  and  Ezekiel  Webster  a  better  lawyer 
than  Daniel. 

j  Applied  to  the  literary  history  of  a  race,  this 
principle  is  suggestive.  We  must  be  slow  to  af 
firm  that,  because  certain  ideas  and  feelings  did 
not  attain,  in  this  or  that  age  or  place,  to  purely 
literary  expression,  they  were  therefore  not  in 
existence.  The  men  and  women  of  the  colonial 
period  in  our  own  country,  for  instance,  have 
been  pretty  uniformly  declared  to  have  been 
deficient  in  the  sense  of  beauty.  What  is  the  evi 
dence  ?  It  is  mostly  negative.  They  produced 
no  poetry,  fiction,  painting,  sculpture,  or  music 
worthy  of  the  name.  They  were  predominantly 
Puritan,  and  the  whole  world  has  been  informed 
that  English  Puritanism  was  hostile  to  Art. 
They  were  preoccupied  with  material  and  moral 
concerns.  Even  if  they  had  remained  in  Eng 
land,  Professor  Trent  affirms,  these  contempo 
raries  of  Milton  and  Bunyan  would  have  pro 
duced  no  art  or  literature.  Now  it  is  quite  true 
that  for  nearly  two  hundred  years  after  the  date 
[  16] 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

of  the  first  settlementof  the  American  colonists, 
opportunities  for  cultivating  the  arts  did  not 
exist.  But  that  the  sense  of  beauty  was  wholly 
atrophied,  I,  for  one,  do  not  believe.  The  pas 
sionate  eagerness  with  which  the  forefathers  ab 
sorbed  the  noblest  of  all  poetry  and  prose  in  the 
pages oftheirone book, the  Bible;  theunwearied 
curiosity  and  care  with  which  those  farmers  and 
fishermen  and  woodsmen  read  the  signs  of  the 
sky ;  their  awe  of  the  dark  wilderness  and  their 
familiar  traffic  with  the  great  deep  ;  the  silences 
of  lonely  places  ;  the  opulence  of  primeval 
meadows  by  the  clear  streams  ;  the  English 
flowers  that  were  made  to  bloom  again  in  farm 
house  windows  and  along  garden  walks;  the 
inner  visions,  more  lovely  still,  of  duty  and  of 
moral  law  ;  the  spirit  of  sacrifice  ;  the  daily  walk 
with  God,  whether  by  green  pastures  of  the 
spirit  or  through  ways  that  were  dark  and  ter 
rible  ;  —  is  there  in  all  this  no  discipline  of  the 
soul  in  moral  beauty,  and  no  trainingof  the  eye 
to  perceive  the  exquisite  harmonies  of  the  visi 
ble  earth  ?  It  is  true  that  the  Puritans  had  no 
professional  men  of  letters  ;  it  is  true  that  doc 
trinal  sermons  provided  their  chief  intellectual 
sustenance  ;  true  that  their  lives  were  stern,  and 

[  17] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

that  many  of  the  softer  emotions  were  repressed. 
But  beauty  may  still  be  traced  in  the  fragments 
of  their  recorded  speech,  in  their  diaries  and 
letters  and  phrases  of  devotion.  You  will  search 
the  eighteenth  century  of  old  England  in  vain 
for  such  ecstasies  of  wonder  at  the  glorious 
beauty  of  the  universe  as  were  penned  by  Jona 
than  Edwards  in  his  youthful  Diary.  There  is 
every  presumption,  from  what  we  know  of  the 
two  men,  that  Whittier's  father  andgrandfather 
were  peculiarly  sensitive  to  the  emotions  of 
home  and  neighborhood  and  domesticity  which 
their  gifted  descendant — too  physically  frail 
to  be  absorbed  in  the  rude  labor  of  the  farm  — 
has  embodied  in  Snow-Bound.  The  Quaker 
poet  knew  that  he  surpassed  his  forefathers  in 
facility  in  verse-making,  but  hewould  have  been 
a.mused(as\\is  Margaret  Smith's  Journalproves] 
at  the  notion  that  his  ancestors  were  without  a 
sense  of  beauty  or  that  they  lacked  responsive 
ness  to  the  chords  of  fireside  sentiment.  He 
was  simply  the  only  Whittier,  except  his  sister 
Elizabeth,  who  had  ever  found  leisure,  as  old- 
fashioned  correspondents  used  to  say,"  to  take 
his  pen  in  hand/'  This  leisure  developed  in  him 
the  sense  — latent  no  doubt  in  his  ancestors  — 

[  18] 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

of  the  beauty  of  words,  and  the  excitement 
of  rhythm.  Emerson's  Journal  m  the  eighteen- 
thirties  glows  with  a  Dionysiac  rapture  over 
what  he  calls  "delicious  days";  but  did  the 
seven  generations  of  clergymen  from  whom 
Emerson  descended  have  no  delicious  and 
haughty  and  tender  days  that  passed  unre 
corded  ?  Formal  literature  perpetuates  and 
glorifies  many  aspects  of  individual  and  national 
experience ;  but  how  much  eludes  it  wholly,  or 
is  told,  if  at  all,  in  broken  syllables,  in  Pente 
costal  tongues  that  seem  to  be  our  own  and  yet 
are  unutterably  strange  ! 

To  confess  thus  that  literature,  in  the  proper 
sense  of  the  word,  represents  but  a  narrow  seg 
ment  of  personal  or  racial  experience,  is  very 
far  from  a  denial  of  the  genuineness  and  the 
significance  of  the  affirmations  which  literature 
makes.  We  recognize  instinctively  that  Whit- 
tier's  Snow-Bound  is  a  truthful  report,  not  merely 
of  a  certain  farmhouse  kitchen  in  East  Haver- 
hill,  Massachusetts,  during  the  early  nineteenth 
century,  but  of  a  mode  of  thinking  and  feeling 
which  is  widely  diffused  wherever  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  race  has  wandered.  Perhaps  Snow-Bound 
lacks  a  certain  universality  of  suggestiveness 

[  19] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

which  belongs  to  a  still  more  famous  poem,  The 
Cotter  s  Saturday  Night  of  Burns,  but  both  of 
these  portrayals  of  rustic  simplicity  and  peace 
owe  their  celebrity  to  their  truly  representative 
character.  They  are  evidence  furnished  by  a 
single  art,  as  to  a  certain  mode  and  coloring  of 
human  existence ;  but  every  corroboration  of 
that  evidence  heightens  our  admiration  for  the 
artistic  sincerity  and  insight  of  the  poet.  To 
draw  an  illustration  from  amore  splendid  epoch, 
let  us  remind  ourselves  that  the  literature  of 
the  "  spacious  times  of  great  Elizabeth  "  —  a 
period  of  strong  national  excitement,  and  one 
deeply  representative  of  the  very  noblest  and 
most  permanent  traits  of  English  national  char 
acter —  was  produced  within  startlingly  few 
years  and  in  a  local  territory  extremely  limited. 
The  very  language  in  which  that  literature  is 
clothed  was  spoken  only  by  the  court,  by  a  cou 
ple  of  counties,  and  at  the  two  universities.  Its 
prose  and  verse  were  frankly  experimental.  It 
is  true  that  such  was  the  emotional  ferment  of 
the  score  of  years  preceding  the  Armada,  that 
great  captains  and  voyagers  who  scarcely  wrote 
a  line  were  hailed  as  kings  of  the  realm  of  im 
agination,  and  that  Puttenham,  in  phrases  which 

[-i 
20 
j 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

that  generation  could  not  have  found  extrava 
gant,  inscribes  his  book  on  Poetry  to  Queen 
Elizabeth  as  the  "  most  excellent  Poet  "  of  the 
age.  Well,  the  glorified  political  images  may 
grow  dim  or  tawdry  with  time,  but  the  poetry 
has  endured,  and  it  is  everywhere  felt  to  be  a 
truly  national,  a  deeply  racial  product.  Its  time 
and  place  and  hour  were  all  local ;  but  the  Ca 
nadian  and  the  American,  the  South  African 
and  Australasian  Englishman  feels  that  that 
Elizabethan  poetry  is  his  poetry  still. 

When  we  pass,  therefore,  as  we  must  shortly 
do,  to  the  consideration  of  this  and  that  literary 
product  of  America,  and  to  the  scrutiny  of  the 
really  representative  character  of  our  books,  we 
must  bear  in  mind  that  the  questions  concerning 
the  race,  the  place,  the  hour,  the  man,  —  ques 
tions  so  familiar  to  modern  criticism,  —  remain 
valid  and  indeed  essential;  but  that  in  apply 
ing  them  to  American  writing  there  are  cer 
tain  allowances,  qualifications,  adjustments  of 
the  scale  of  values,  which  are  no  less  important 
to  an  intelligent  perception  of  the  quality  of  our 
literature.  This  task  is  less  simple  than  the  crit 
ical  assessment  of  a  typical  German  or  French 
or  Scandinavian  writer,  where  the  strain  of  blood 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

is  unmixed,  the  continuity  of  literary  tradition 
unbroken,  the  precise  impact  of  historical  and 
personal  influences  more  easy  to  estimate.  I 
open,  for  example,  any  one  of  half  a  dozen 
French  studies  of  Balzac.  Here  is  a  many-sided 
man,  a  multifarious  writer,  a  personality  that 
makes  ridiculous  the  merely  formal  pigeon 
holing  and  labelling  processes  of  professional 
criticism.  And  yet  with  what  perfect  precision 
of  method  and  certainty  of  touch  do  Le  Breton, 
for  example,  or  Brunetiere,  in  their  books  on 
Balzac,  proceed  to  indicate  those  impulses  of 
race  and  period  and  environment  which  affected 
the  character  of  Balzac's  novels !  The  fact  that 
he  was  born  in  Tours  in  1799  results  in  the  in 
evitable  and  inevitably  expert  paragraphs  about 
Gallic  blood,  and  the  physical  exuberance  of  the 
Touraine  surroundings  of  his  youth,  and  the 
post-revolutionary  tendency  to  disillusion  and 
analysis.  And  so  with  Balzac's  education,  his 
removal  to  Paris  in  the  Restoration  period,  his 
ventures  in  business  and  his  affairs  of  love,  his 
admiration  for  Shakespeare  and  for  Fenimore 
Cooper;  his  mingled  Romanticism  and  Real 
ism  ;  his  Titanism  and  his  childishness ;  his  stu 
pendous  outline  for  the  Human  Comedy;  and 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

his  scarcely  less  astounding  actual  achievement. 
All  this  is  discussed  by  his  biographers  with  the 
professional  dexterity  of  critics  trained  intellec 
tually  in  the  Latin  traditions  and  instinctively 
aware  of  the  claims  of  race,  biographers  familiar 
with  every  page  of  French  history,  and  pro 
foundly  interested,  like  their  readers,  in  every 
aspect  of  French  life.  Alas,  we  may  say,  in 
despairing  admiration  of  such  workmanship, 
"  they  order  these  things  better  in  France." 
And  they  do ;  but  racial  unity,  and  long  lines  of 
national  literary  tradition,  make  these  things 
easier  to  order  than  they  are  with  us.  The 
intellectual  distinction  of  American  critical 
biographies  like  Lounsbury's  Cooper  or  Wood- 
berry's  Hawthorne  is  all  the  more  notable  be 
cause  we  possess  such  a  slender  body  of  truly 
critical  doctrine  native  to  our  own  soil ;  because 
our  national  literary  tradition  as  to  available 
material  and  methods  is  hardly  formed;  because 
the  very  word  "American"  has  a  less  precise 
connotation  than  the  word  "New  Zealander." 
Let  us  suppose,  for  instance,  that  like  Pro 
fessor  Woodberry  a  few  years  ago,  we  were 
asked  to  furnish  a  critical  study  of  Hawthorne. 
The  author  of  The  Scarlet  Letter  is  one  of  the 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

most  justly  famous  of  American  writers.  But 
precisely  what  national  traits  are  to  be  discov 
ered  in  this  eminent  fellow-countryman  of  ours? 
We  turn,  like  loyal  disciples  of  Taine  and  Sainte- 
Beuve,  to  his  ancestral  stock.  We  find  that  it 
is  English  as  far  back  as  it  can  be  traced;  as 
purely  English  as  the  ancestry  of  Dickens  or 
Thackeray,  and  more  purely  English  than  the 
ancestry  of  Browning  or  Burke  or  His  Majesty 
George  the  Fifth.  Was  Hawthorne,  then,  sim 
ply  an  Englishman  living  in  America  ?  He 
himself  did  not  think  so,  —  as  his  English  Note- 
Books  abundantly  prove.  But  just  what  subtle 
racial  differentiation  had  been  at  work,  since 
William  Hawthorne  migrated  to  Massachusetts 
with  Winthrop  in  1630?  Here  we  face,  unless 
I  am  mistaken,  that  troublesome  but  fascinat 
ing  question  of  Physical  Geography.  Climate, 
soil,  food,  occupation,  religious  or  moral  pre 
occupation,  social  environment,  Salem  witch 
craft  and  Salem  seafaring  had  all  laid  their  in 
visible  hands  upon  the  physical  and  intellectual 
endowment  of  the  child  born  in  1804.  Does 
this  make  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  merely  an 
"  Englishman  with  a  difference,"  as  Mr.  Kip 
ling,  born  in  India,  is  an  "  Englishman  with  a 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

difference"?  Hawthorne  would  have  smiled, 
or,  more  probably,  he  would  have  sworn,  at  such 
a  question.  He  considered  himself  an  Ameri 
can  Democrat;  in  fact  a  contra  mundum  Demo 
crat,  for  good  or  for  ill.  Is  it,  then,  a  political 
theory,  first  put  into  full  operation  in  this 
country  a  scant  generation  before  Hawthorne's 
birth,  which  made  him  un-English  ?  We  must 
walk  warily  here.  Our  Canadian  neighbors  of 
English  stock  have  much  the  same  climate,  soil, 
occupations,  and  preoccupations  as  the  inhabit 
ants  of  the  northern  territory  of  the  United 
States.  They  have  much  the  same  courts, 
churches,  and  legislatures.  They  read  the  same 
books  and  magazines.  They  even  prefer  base 
ball  to  cricket.  They  are  loyal  adherents  of  a 
monarchy,  but  they  are  precisely  as  free,  as  self- 
governing,  and  —  in  the  social  sense  of  the 
word  —  as  "  democratic  "  —  in  spite  of  the  ab 
sence  of  a  republican  form  of  government  —  as 
the  citizens  of  that C£  land  of  the  free  and  home 
of  the  brave  "  which  lies  to  the  south  of  them. 
Yet  Canadian  literature,  one  may  venture  to 
affirm,  has  remained  to  this  hour  a  "  colonial" 
literature,  or,  if  one  prefers  the  phrase,  a  litera 
ture  of  "  Greater  Britain."  Was  Hawthorne 

[25  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

possibly  right  in  his  instinct  that  politics  did 
make  a  difference,  and  that  in  writing  The 
Marble  Faun, — the  scene  of  which  is  laid  in 
Rome,  —  or  The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables,  — 
which  is  a  story  of  Salem,  —  he  was  consist 
ently  engaged  in  producing,  not  "colonial" 
or  "  Greater-British  "  but  distinctly  American 
literature  ?  We  need  not  answer  this  ques 
tion  prematurely,  if  we  wish  to  reserve  our  judg 
ment,  but  it  is  assuredly  one  of  the  questions 
which  the  biographers  and  critics  of  our  men 
of  letters  must  ultimately  face  and  answer. 

Furthermore,  the  student  of  literature  pro 
duced  in  the  United  States  of  America  must 
face  other  questions  almost  as  complicated  as 
this  of  race.  In  fact,  when  wechoose  Hawthorne 
as  a  typical  case  in  which  to  observe  the  Ameri 
can  refashioning  of  the  English  temper  into 
something  not  English,  we  are  selecting  a  very 
simple  problem  compared  with  the  complex 
ities  which  have  resulted  from  the  mingling  of 
various  European  stocks  upon  American  soil. 
But  take,  for  the  moment,  the  mere  obvious 
matter  of  expanse  of  territory.  We  are  obliged 
to  reckon,  not  with  a  compact  province  such  as 
those  in  which  many  Old  World  literatures 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

have  been  produced,  but  with  what  our  grand 
fathers  considered  a  "  boundless  continent." 
This  vast  national  domain  was  long  ago  "  or 
ganized  "  for  political  purposes :  but  so  far  as 
literature  is  concerned  it  remains  unorganized 
to-day.  We  have,  as  has  been  constantly  ob 
served,  no  literary  capital,  like  London  or  Paris, 
to  serve  as  the  seat  of  centralized  authority ; 
no  code  of  literary  procedure  and  conduct ;  no 
"lawgivers  of  Parnassus";  no  supreme  court  of 
letters,  whose  judgments  are  recognized  and 
obeyed.  American  public  opinion  asserts  itself 
with  singular  unanimity  and  promptness  in  the 
field  of  politics.  In  literary  matters  we  remain 
in  the  stage  of  anarchic  individualism,  liable  to 
be  stampeded  from  time  to  time  by  mob-ex 
citement  over  a  popular  novel  or  moralistic 
tract,  and  then  disintegrating,  as  before,  into 
an  incoherent  mass  of  individually  intelligent 
readers. 

The  reader  who  has  some  personal  acquaint 
ance  with  the  variations  of  type  in  different  sec 
tions  of  this  immense  territory  of  ours  finds  his 
curiosity  constantly  stimulated  by  the  presence 
of  sectional  and  local  characteristics.  There  are 
sharply  cut  provincial  peculiarities,  of  course, 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

in  Great  Britain  and  in  Germany,  in  Italy  and 
Spain,  and  in  all  of  the  countries  a  correspond 
ing  "  regional "  literature  has  been  developed. 
Our  provincial  variations  of  accent  and  vocabu 
lary,  in  passing  from  North  to  South  or  East 
to  West,  are  less  striking,  on  the  whole,  than 
the  dialectical  differences  found  in  the  various 
English  counties.  But  our  general  uniformity 
of  grammar  and  the  comparatively  slight  vari 
ations  in  spoken  accent  cover  an  extraordinary 
variety  of  local  and  sectional  modes  of  thinking 
and  feeling.  The  reader  of  American  short 
stories  and  lyrics  must  constantly  ask  himself: 
Is  this  truth  to  local  type  consistent  with  the 
main  trend  of  American  production  ?  Is  this 
merely  a  bit  of  Virginia  or  Texas  or  California, 
or  does  it,  while  remaining  no  less  Southern  or 
Western  in  its  local  coloring,  suggest  also  the 
ampler  light,  the  wide  generous  air  of  the  United 
States  of  America? 

The  observer  of  this  relationship  between 
local  and  national  types  will  find  some  Ameri 
can  communities  where  all  the  speech  or  habit 
ual  thought  is  of  the  future.  Foreigners  usually 
consider  such  communities  the  most  typically 
"American,"  as  doubtless  they  are;  but  there 

[28] 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

are  other  sections,  still  more  faithfully  exploited 
by  local  writers,  where  the  mood  is  wistful  and 
habitually  regards  the  past.  America,  too,  like 
the  Old  World,  —  and  in  New  England  more 
than  elsewhere,  —  has  her  note  of  decadence, 
of  disillusion,  of  autumnal  brightness  and  trans 
iency.  Some  sections  of  the  country,  and  not 
ably  the  slave-holding  states  in  the  forty  years 
preceding  the  Civil  War,  have  suffered  wide 
spread  intellectual  blight.  The  best  talent  of 
the  South,  for  a  generation,  went  into  politics, 
in  the  passionately  loyal  endeavor  to  prop  up 
a  doomed  economic  and  social  system  ;  and  the 
loss  to  the  intellectual  life  of  the  country  can 
not  be  reckoned.  Over  vast  sections  of  our 
prosperous  and  intelligent  people  of  the  Miss 
issippi  Basin  to-day  the  very  genius  of  com- 
monplaceness  seems  to  hover.  Take  the  great 
State  of  Iowa,  with  its  well-to-do  and  homo 
geneous  population,  its  fortunate  absence  of 
perplexing  city-problems,  its  general  air  of  pro 
sperity  and  content.  It  is  a  typical  state  of  the 
most  typically  American  portion  of  the  country ; 
but  it  breeds  no  books.  Yet  in  Indiana,  another 
state  of  the  same  general  conditions  as  to  pop 
ulation  and  prosperity,  and  only  one  generation 

[*9  J 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

further  removed  than  Iowa  from  primitive  pio 
neer  conditions,  books  are  produced  at  a  rate 
which  provokes  a  universal  American  smile. 
I  do  not  affirm  that  the  literary  critic  is  bound 
to  answer  all  such  local  puzzles  as  this.  But  he 
is  bound  at  least  to  reflect  upon  them,  and  to 
demand  of  every  local  literary  product  through 
out  this  varied  expanse  of  states  :  Is  the  root  of 
the  "  All-American  "  plant  growing  here,  or  is 
it  not  ? 

Furthermore,  the  critic  must  pursue  this  in 
vestigation  of  national  traits  in  our  writing,  not 
only  over  a  wide  and  variegated  territory,  but 
through  a  very  considerable  sweep  of  time. 
American  literature  is  often  described  as  "  cal 
low,"  as  the  revelation  of  "  national  inexperi 
ence,"  and  in  other  similar  terms.  It  is  true  that 
we  had  no  professional  men  of  letters  before 
Irving  and  that  the  blossoming  time  of  the  not 
able  New  England  group  of  writers  did  not 
come  until  nearly  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth 
century.  But  we  have  had  time  enough,  after 
all,  to  show  what  we  wish  to  be  and  what  we  are. 
There  have  been  European  books  about 
America  ever  since  the  days  of  Columbus;  it  is 
three  hundred  years  since  the  first  books  were 

[30] 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

written  in  America.  Modern  English  prose, 
the  language  of  journalism,  of  science,  of  social 
intercourse,  came  into  being  only  in  the  early 
eighteenth  century,  in  the  age  of  Queen  Anne. 
But  Cotton  Mather's  Magnalia,  a  vast  book 
dealing  with  the  past  history  of  New  England,  * 
was  printed  in  1702,  only  a  year  later  than  De 
foe's  True-Born  Englishman.  For  more  than  two 
centuries  the  development  of  English  speech 
and  English  writing  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic 
has  kept  measurable  pace  —  now  slower,  now 
swifter — withthespeechof  themothercountry. 
When  we  recall  the  scanty  term  of  years  within 
which  was  produced  the  literature  of  the  age  of 
Elizabeth,  it  seems  like  special  pleading  to  in 
sist  that  America  has  not  yet  had  time  to  learn 
or  recite  her  bookish  lessons. 

This  is  not  saying  that  we  have  had  a  con 
tinuous  or  adequate  development,  either  of 
the  intellectual  life,  or  of  literary  expression. 
There  are  certain  periods  of  strong  intellectual 
movement,  of  heightened  emotion,  alike  in  the 
colonial  epoch  and  since  the  adoption  of  our 
present  form  of  government,  in  which  it  is  nat 
ural  to  search  for  revelations  of  those  qualities 
which  we  now  feel  to  be  essential  to  our  national 

[31  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

character.  Certain  epochs  of  our  history,  in 
other  words,  have  been  peculiarly  "American/' 
and  have  furnished  the  most  ideal  expression 
of  national  tendencies. 

If  asked  to  select  the  three  periods  of  our 
history  which  in  this  sense  have  been  most  sig 
nificant,  most  of  us,  I  imagine,  would  choose 
the  first  vigorous  epoch  of  New  England  Puri 
tanism,  say  from  1630  to  1676  ;  then,  the  epoch 
of  the  great  Virginians,  say  from  1766  to  1789  ; 
and  finally  the  epoch  of  distinctly  national  feel 
ing,  in  which  New  England  and  the  West  were 
leaders,  between  1830  and  1865.  Those  three 
generations  have  been  the  most  notable  in  the 
three  hundred  years  since  the  permanent  settle 
ments  began.  Each  of  them  has  revealed,  in  a 
noble  fashion,  the  political,  ethical,  and  emo 
tional  traits  of  our  people ;  and  although  the 
first  two  of  the  three  periods  concerned  them 
selves  but  little  with  literary  expression  of  the 
deep-lying  characteristics  of  our  stock,  the 
expression  is  not  lacking.  Thomas  Hooker's 
sermon  on  the  "Foundation  of  Political  Au 
thority,"  John  Winthrop's  grave  advice  on  the 
"  Nature  of  Liberty,"  Jefferson's  "  Declara 
tion,"  Webster's  "Reply  to  Hayne,"  Lincoln's 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

"Inaugurals,"  are  all  fundamentally  American. 
They  are  political  in  their  immediate  purpose, 
but,  like  the  speeches  of  Edmund  Burke,  they 
are  no  less  literature  because  they  are  concerned 
with  the  common  needs  and  the  common  des 
tiny.  Hooker  and  Winthrop  wrote  before  our 
formal  national  existence  began ;  Jefferson,  at 
the  hour  of  the  nation's  birth  ;  and  Lincoln,  in 
the  day  of  its  sharpest  trial.  Yet,  though  separ 
ated  from  one  another  by  long  intervals  of 
time,  the  representative  figures  of  the  three 
epochs,  English  in  blood  and  American  in  feel 
ing,  are  not  so  unlike  as  one  might  think.  A 
thorough  grasp  of  our  literature  thus  requires 
—  and  in  scarcely  less  a  degree  than  the  mastery 
of  one  of  the  literatures  of  Europe  —  a  survey 
of  a  long  period,  the  search  below  the  baffling 
or  contradictory  surface  of  national  experience 
for  the  main  drift  of  that  experience,  and  the 
selection  of  the  writers,  of  one  generation  after 
another,  who  have  given  the  most  fit  and  per 
manent  and  personalized  expression  to  the  un 
derlying  forces  of  the  national  life. 

There  is  another  preliminary  word  which 
needs  no  less  to  be  said.  It  concerns  the  ques 
tion  of  international  influences  upon  national 

[33] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

literature.  Our  own  generation  has  been  taught 
by  many  events  that  no  race  or  country  can 
any  longer  live  "  to  itself."  Internationalism 
is  in  the  very  atmosphere:  and  not  merely  as 
regards  politics  in  the  narrowed  sense,  but  with 
reference  to  questions  of  economics,  sociology, 
art,  and  letters.  The  period  of  international  iso 
lation  of  the  United  States,  we  are  rather  too 
fond  of  saying,  closed  with  the  Spanish-Amer 
ican  War.  It  would  be  nearer  the  truth  to  say 
that  so  far  as  the  things  of  the  mind  and  the 
spirit  are  concerned,  there  has  never  been  any 
absolute  isolation.  The  Middle  West,  from 
the  days  of  Jackson  to  Lincoln,  that  raw  West 
described  by  Dickens  and  Mrs. Trollope, comes 
nearer  isolation  than  any  other  place  or  time. 
The  period  of  the  most  eloquent  assertions  of 
American  independence  in  artistic  and  literary 
matters  was  the  epoch  of  New  England  Trans 
cendentalism,  which  was  itself  singularly  cos 
mopolitan  in  its  literary  appetites.  The  letters 
and  journals  of  Emerson,  Whitman,  and  Tho- 
reau  show  the  strong  European  meat  on  which 
these  men  fed,  just  before  their  robust  declar 
ations  of  our  self-sufficiency.  But  there  is  no 
real  self-sufficiency,  and  Emerson  and  Whit- 

[34] 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

man  themselves,  in  other  moods,  have  written 
most  suggestive  passages  upon  our  European 
inheritances  and  affiliations. 

The  fortunes  of  the  early  New  England  colo 
nies,  in  fact,  were  followed  by  Protestant  Eu 
rope  with  the  keen  solicitude  and  affection  of 
kinsmen.  Oliver  Cromwell  signs  his  letter 
to  John  Cotton  in  1651,  "Your  affectionate 
friend  to  serve  you/'  The  settlements  were  re 
garded  as  outposts  of  European  ideas.  Their 
Calvinism,  so  cheaply  derided  and  so  super 
ficially  understood,  even  to-day,  was  the  intel 
lectual  platform  of  that  portion  of  Europe 
which  was  mentally  and  morally  awake  to  the 
vast  issues  involved  in  individual  respon 
sibility  and  self-government.  Contemporary 
European  democracy  is  hardly  yet  aware  that 
Calvin's  Institutes  is  one  of  its  great  charters. 
Continental  Protestantism  of  the  seventeenth 
century,  like  the  militant  Republicanism  of 
the  English  Commonwealth,  thus  perused  with 
fraternal  interest  the  letters  from  Massachu 
setts  Bay.  And  if  Europe  watched  America 
in  those  days,  it  was  no  less  true  that  America 
was  watching  Europe.  Towards  the  end  of 
the  century,  Cotton  Mather,  "  prostrate  in  the 

C  35  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

dust "  before  the  Lord,  as  his  newly  published 
Diary  tells  us,  is  wrestling  "  on  the  behalf  of 
whole  nations."  He  receives  a  "  strong  Persua 
sion  that  very  overturning  Dispensations  of 
Heaven  will  quickly  befal  the  French  Em 
pire";  he  "lifts  up  his  Cries  for  a  mighty  and 
speedy  Revolution  "  there.  "  I  spread  before  the 
Lord  the  Condition  of  His  Church  abroad  .  .  . 
especially  in  Great  Britain  and  in  France.  And  I 
prayed  that  the  poor  Vaudois  may  not  be  ruined 
by  the  Peace  now  made  between  France  and 
Savoy.  I  prayed  likewise  for  further  Mor 
tifications  upon  the  Turkish  Empire."  Here 
surely  was  one  colonial  who  was  trying,  in  Cecil 
Rhodes's  words,  to  "think  continentally!" 

Furthermore,  the  leaders  of  those  early  col 
onies  were  in  large  measure  university  men, 
disciplined  in  the  classics,  fit  representatives  of 
European  culture.  It  has  been  reckoned  that 
between  the  years  1630  and  1690  there  were 
in  New  England  as  many  graduates  of  Cam 
bridge  and  Oxford  as  could  be  found  in  any 
population  of  similar  size  in  the  mother  coun 
try.  At  one  time  during  those  years  there  was 
in  Massachusetts  and  Connecticut  alone  a 
Cambridge  graduate  for  every  two  hundred  and 

[36] : 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

fifty  inhabitants.  Like  the  exiled  Greeks  in 
Matthew  Arnold's  poem,  they  "undid  their 
corded  bales  "  —  of  learning,  it  is  true,  rather 
than  of  merchandise  —  upon  these  strange  and 
inhospitable  shores :  and  the  traditions  of 
Greek  and  Hebrew  and  Latin  scholarship  were 
maintained  with  no  loss  of  continuity.  To  the 
lover  of  letters  there  will  always  be  something 
fine  in  the  thought  of  that  narrow  seaboard 
fringe  of  faith  in  the  classics,  widening  slowly 
as  the  wilderness  gave  way,  making  its  invis 
ible  road  up  the  rivers,  across  the  mountains, 
into  the  great  interior  basin,  and  only  after  the 
Civil  War  finding  an  enduring  home  in  the  , 
magnificent  state  universities  of  the  West.  \ 
Lovers  of  Greek  and  Roman  literature  may 
perhaps  always  feel  themselves  pilgrims  and 
exiles  in  this  vast  industrial  democracy  of  ours, 
but  they  have  at  least  secured  for  us,  and  that 
from  the  very  first  day  of  the  colonies,  some 
of  the  best  fruitage  of  internationalism.  For 
that  matter,  what  was,  and  is,  that  one  Book 
—  to  the  eyes  of  the  Protestant  seventeenth 
century  infallible  and  inexpressively  sacred  — 
but  the  most  potent  and  universal  commerce 
of  ideas  and  spirit,  passing  from  the  Orient, 

[37] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

through  Greek  and  Roman  civilization,  into 
the  mind  and  heart  of  Western  Europe  and 
America  ? 

"  Oh,  East  is  East,  and  West  is  West, 
And  never  the  twain  shall  meet," 

declares  a  confident  poet  of  to-day.  But  East 
and  West  met  long  ago  in  the  matchless  phrases 
translated  from  Hebrew  and  Greek  and  Latin 
into  the  English  Bible ;  and  the  heart  of  the 
East  there  answers  to  the  heart  of  the  West  as 
in  water  face  answereth  to  face.  That  the  colo 
nizing  Englishmen  of  the  seventeenth  century 
were  Hebrews  in  spiritual  culture,  and  heirs  of 
Greece  and  Rome  without  ceasing  to  be  Anglo- 
Saxon  in  blood,  is  one  of  the  marvels  of  the  his 
tory  of  civilization,  and  it  is  one  of  the  basal 
facts  in  the  intellectual  life  of  the  United  States 
of to-day. 

Yet  that  life,  as  I  have  already  hinted,  is  not 
so  simple  in  its  terms  as  it  might  be  if  we  had  to 
reckon  merely  with  the  men  of  a  single  stock, 
albeit  with  imaginations  quickened  by  contact 
with  an  Oriental  religion,  and  minds  disciplined, 
directly  or  indirectly,  by  the  methods  and  the 
literatures  which  the  Revival  of  Learning  im 
posed  upon  modern  Europe.  American  formal 

[38  ] 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

culture  is,  and  has  been,  from  the  beginning,  pre 
dominantly  English.  Yet  it  has  been  colored  by 
the  influences  of  other  strains  of  race,  and  by 
alien  intellectual  traditions.  Such  international 
influences  as  have  reached  us  through  German 
and  Scandinavian,  Celtic  and  Italian,  Russian 
and  Jewish  immigration,  are  well  marked  in 
certain  localities,  although  their  traces  may  be 
difficult  to  follow  in  the  main  trend  of  American 
writing.  The  presence  of  Negro,  Irishman,  Jew, 
and  German,  has  affected  our  popular  humor 
and  satire,  and  is  everywhere  to  be  marked  in 
the  vocabulary  and  tone  of  our  newspapers. 
The  cosmopolitan  character  of  the  population 
of  such  cities  as  New  York  and  Chicago  strikes 
every  foreign  observer.  Each  one  of  the  mani 
fold  races  now  transplanted  here  and  in  process 
of  Americanization  has  for  a  while  its  own  news 
papers  and  churches  and  social  life  carried  on  in 
a  foreign  dialect.  But  this  stage  of  evolution 
passes  swiftly.  The  assimilative  forces  of  Amer 
ican  schools,  industry,  commerce,  politics,  are 
too  strong  for  the  foreign  immigrant  to  resist. 
The  Italian  or  Greek  fruit  pedler  soon  prefers 
to  talk  English,  and  his  children  can  be  made 
to  talk  nothing  else.  This  extraordinary  amal- 

[39] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

gamating  power  of  English  culture  explains, 
no  doubt,  why  German  and  Scandinavian  im 
migration  —  to  take  examples  from  two  of  the 
most  intelligent  and  educated  races  that  have 
contributed  to  the  up-building  of  the  country 
—  have  left  so  little  trace,  as  yet,  upon  our 
more  permanent  literature. 

But  blood  will  have  its  say  sooner  or  later. 
No  one  knows  how  profoundly  the  strong 
mentality  of  the  Jew,  already  evident  enough 
in  the  fields  of  manufacturing  and  finance,  will 
mould  the  intellectual  life  of  the  United  States. 
The  mere  presence,  to  say  nothing  of  the  rapid 
absorption,  of  these  millions  upon  millions  of 
aliens,  as  the  children  of  the  Puritans  regard 
them,  is  a  constant  evidence  of  the  subtle  ways 
in  which  internationalism  is  playing  its  part  in 
the  fashioning  of  the  American  temper.  The 
moulding  hand  of  the  German  university  has 
been  laid  upon  our  higher  institutions  of  learn 
ing  for  seventy  years,  although  no  one  can 
demonstrate  in  set  terms  whether  the  influence 
of  Goethe,  read  now  by  three  generations  of 
American  scholars  and  studied  by  millions  of 
youth  in  the  schools,  has  left  any  real  markupon 
our  literature.  Abraham  Lincoln,  in  his  store- 

[40] 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

keeping  days,  used  to  sit  under  a  tree  outside 
the  grocery  store  of  Lincoln  and  Berry,  read 
ing  Voltaire.)  One  would  like  to  think  that  he 
then  and  there  assimilated  something  of  the  in 
comparable  lucidity  of  style  of  the  great  French 
man.  But  Voltaire's  influence  upon  Lincoln's 
style  cannot  be  proved,  any  more  than  Rous 
seau's  direct  influence  upon  Jefferson.  Tolstoi 
and  Ibsen  have,  indeed,  left  unmistakable  traces 
upon  American  imaginative  writing  during  the 
last  quarter  of  a  century.  Frank  Norris  was  in 
debted  to  Zola  for  the  scheme  of  that  uncom 
pleted  trilogy,  the  prose  epic  of  the  Wheat ;  and 
Owen  Wister  has  revealed  a  not  uncommon  ex 
perience  of  our  younger  writing  men  in  confess 
ing  that  the  impulse  toward  writing  his  Western 
stories  came  to  him  after  reading  the  delightful 
pages  of  a  French  romancer.  But  all  this  tells 
us  merely  what  we  knew  well  enough  before : 
that  from  colonial  days  to  the  present  hour  the 
Atlantic  has  been  no  insuperable  barrier  be 
tween  the  thought  of  Europe  and  the  mind  of 
America ;  that  no  one  race  bears  aloft  all  the 
torches  of  intellectual  progress ;  and  that  a  really 
vital  writer  of  any  country  finds  a  home  in  the 
spiritual  life  of  every  other  country,  even  though 

[41  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

it  may  be  difficult  to  find  his  name  in  the  local 
directory. 

Finally,  we  must  bear  in  mind  that  purely 
literary  evidence  as  to  the  existence  of  certain 
national  traits  needs  corroboration  from  many 
non-literary  sources.  If  it  is  dangerous  to  judge 
modern  Japan  by  the  characteristics  of  a  piece 
of  pottery,  it  is  only  less  misleading  to  select 
half  a  dozen  excellent  New  England  writers  of 
fifty  years  ago  as  sole  witnesses  to  the  qualities 
of  contemporary  America.  We  must  broaden 
the  range  of  evidence.  The  historians  of  Amer 
ican  literature  must  ultimately  reckon  with  all 
those  sources  of  mental  and  emotional  quick 
ening  which  have  yielded  to  our  pioneer  peo 
ple  a  substitute  for  purely  literary  pleasures  : 
they  must  do  justice  to  the  immense  mass  of 
letters,  diaries,  sermons,  editorials,  speeches, 
which  have  served  as  the  grammar  and  phrase- 
book  of  national  feeling.  A  history  of  our  lit 
erature  must  be  flexible  enough,  as  I  have  said 
elsewhere,  to  include  "the  social  and  economic 
and  geographical  background  of  American  life; 
the  zest  of  the  explorer,  the  humor  of  the  pio 
neer;  the  passion  of  old  political  battles;  the 
yearning  after  spiritual  truth  and  social  read- 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

justment ;  the  baffled  quest  of  beauty.  Such  a 
history  must  be  broad  enough  for  the  Federal 
ist  and  for  Webster's  oratory,  for  Beecher's  ser 
mons  and  Greeley's  editorials,  and  the  Lin 
coln-Douglas  debates.  It  must  picture  thedaily 
existence  of  our  citizens  from  the  beginning ; 
their  working  ideas,  their  phrases  and  shibbo 
leths  and  all  their  idols  of  the  forum  and  the 
cave.  It  should  portray  the  misspelled  ideals 
of  a  profoundly  idealistic  people  who  have  been* 
usually  immersed  in  material  things." 

Our  most  characteristic  American  writing, 
as  must  be  pointed  out  again  and  again,  is  not 
the  self-conscious  literary  performance  of  a  Poe 
or  a  Hawthorne.  It  is  civic  writing ;  a  citizen 
literature,  produced,  like  the  Federalist,  and 
Garrison's  editorials  and  Grant's  Memoirs,  with 
out  any  stylistic  consciousness  whatever ;  a  sort 
of  writing  which  has  been  incidental  to  the  ac 
complishment  of  some  political,  social,  or  moral 
purpose,  and  which  scarcely  regards  itself  as 
literature  at  all.  The  supreme  example  of  it  is  • 
the  "  Gettysburg  Address."  Homeliness,  sim 
plicity,  directness,  preoccupation  with  moral 
issues,  have  here  been  but  the  instrument  of 
beauty  ;  phrase  and  thought  and  feeling  have  a 

[43] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

noble  fitness  to  the  national  theme.  "  Nothing 
of  Europe  here,"  we  may  instinctively  exclaim, 
and  yet  the  profounder  lesson  of  this  citizen 
literature  of  ours  is  in  the  universality  of  the 
fundamental  questions  which  our  literature  pre 
sents.  The  "  Gettysburg  Address  "  would  not 
to-day  have  a  secure  fame  in  Europe  if  it  spoke 
nothing  to  the  ear  and  the  heart  of  Europe. 
And  this  brings  us  back  to  our  main  theme. 
,  •  Lincoln,  like  Franklin,  like  many  another 
.  lesser  master  of  our  citizen  literature,  is  a  typ- 
.  ical  American.  In  the  writing  produced  by  such 
men,  there  cannot  but  be  a  revelation  of  Amer 
ican  characteristics.  We  are  now  to  attempt  an 
analysis  of  these  national  traits,  as  they  have 
been  expressed  by  our  representative  writers. 
Simple  as  the  problem  seems,  when  thus 
stated,  its  adequate  performance  calls  for  a 
constant  sensitiveness  to  the  conditions  preva 
lent,  during  a  long  period,  in  English  and  Con 
tinental  society  and  literature.  The  most  rudi 
mentary  biographical  sketch  of  such  eminent 
contemporary  American  authors  as  Mr.  Henry 
James  and  Mr.  Howells  shows  that  Europe 
is  an  essential  factor  in  the  intellectual  life  and 
in  the  artistic  procedure  of  these  writers.  Yet 

[44] 


RACE,  NATION,  AND  BOOK 

in  their  racial  and  national  relationships  they 
are  indubitably  American.  In  their  local  vari 
ations  from  type  they  demand  from  the  critic 
an  understanding  of  the  culture  of  the  Ohio 
Valley,  and  of  Boston  and  New  York.  The 
analysis  of  the  mingled  racial,  psychological, 
social,  and  professional  traits  in  these  masters  of 
contemporary  American  fiction  presents  to  the 
critic  a  problem  as  fascinating  as,  and  I  think 
more  complex  than,  a  corresponding  study  of 
Meredith  or  Hardy,  of  Daudet  or  D'Annun- 
zio.  In  the  three  hundred  years  that  have 
elapsed  since  Englishmen  who  were  trained 
under  Queen  Elizabeth  settled  at  Jamestown, 
Virginia,  we  have  bred  upon  this  soil  many  a 
master  of  speech.  They  have  been  men  of 
varied  gifts  :  now  of  clear  intelligence,  now  of 
commanding  power;  men  of  rugged  simplicity 
and  of  tantalizing  subtlety;  poets,  novelists, 
orators,  essayists,  and  publicists,  who  have  in 
terpreted  the  soul  of  America  to  the  mind  of 
the  world.  Our  task  is  to  exhibit  the  essential 
Americanism  of  these  spokesmen  of  ours,  to 
point  out  the  traits  which  make  them  most 
truly  representative  of  the  instincts  of  the 
tongue-tied  millions  who  work  and  plan  and 

[45] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

pass  from  sight  without  the  gift  and  art  of 
utterance  ;  to  find,  in  short,  among  the  books 
which  are  recognized  as  constituting  our  Amer 
ican  literature,  some  vital  and  illuminating  il 
lustrations  of  our  national  characteristics.  For 
a  truly  "  American  "  book  —  like  an  American 
national  game,  or  an  American  city  —  is  that 
which  reveals,  consciously  or  unconsciously, 
the  American  mind. 


II 

The  American  Mind 

THE  origin  of  the  phrase,  "the  American    / 
mind,"  was  political.   Shortly  after  the  middle 
of  the  eightee'rrrtTcentury,  there  began  to  be  a 
distinctly  American  way  of  regarding  the  de 
batable  question  of  British  Imperial  control. 
During  the  period  of  the  Stamp  Act  agitation 
our  colonial-bred    politicians   and    statesmen 
made  the  discovery  that  there  was  a  mode  of 
thinking  and  feeling  which  was  native  —  or 
had  by  that  time  become  a  second  nature  — 
to  all  the  colonists.    Jefferson,  for  example,      . 
employs  those  resonant  and  useful  words  "  the   n 
American  mind  "  to  indicate  that  throughout  // 
the  American  colonies  an  essential  unity  of  jj     S 
opinion  had  been  developed  as  regards   the! "" 
chief  political  question  of  the  day. 

It  is  one  of  the  most  striking  characteristics 
of  the  present  United  States  that  this  instinct  of 
political  unity  should  have  endured,  triumphing 

[47  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

over  every  temporary  motive  of  division.  The 
inhabitants  of  the  United  States  belong  to  a 
single  political  type.  There  is  scarcely  a  news 
stand  in  any  country  of  Continental  Europe 
where  one  may  not  purchase  a  newspaper 
openly  or  secretly  opposed  to  the  government, 
—  not  merely  attacking  an  unpopular  admin 
istration  or  minister  or  ruler,  —  but  desiring 
and  plotting  the  overthrow  of  the  entire  polit 
ical  system  of  the  country.  It  is  very  difficult 
to  find  such  a  newspaper  anywhere  in  the 
United  States.  I  myself  have  never  seen  one. 
The  opening  sentence  of  President  Butler's 
admirable  little  book,  'The  American  as  He 
Isy  originally  delivered  as  lectures  before  the 
University  of  Copenhagen,  runs  as  follows  : 

"The  most  impressive  fact  in  American  life 
is  the  substantial  unity  of  view  in  regard  to 
Jthe  fundamental  questions  of  government  and 
of  conduct  among  a  population  so  large,  dis 
tributed  over  an  area  so  wide,  recruited  from 
\  sources  so  many  and  so  diverse,  living  under 
conditions  so  widely  different." 

But  the  American  type  of  mind  is  evi 
dent  in  many  other  fields  than  that  of  politics. 
The  stimulating  book  from  which  I  have  just 

[48  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

quoted,  attempts  in  its  closing  paragraph,  after 
touching  upon  the  more  salient  features  of  our 
national  activity,  to  define  the  typical  Amer 
ican  in  these  words  :  — 

"  The  typical  American  is  he  who,  whether 
rich  or  poor,  whether  dwelling  in  the  North, 
South,  East,  or  West,  whether  scholar,  pro 
fessional  man,  merchant,  manufacturer,  farmer, 
or  skilled  worker  for  wages,  lives  the  life  of  a 
good  citizen  and  good  neighbor  ;  who  believes 
loyally  and  with  all  his  heart  in  his  country's 
institutions,  and  in  the  underlying  principles 
on  which  these  institutions  are  built ;  who 
directs  both  his  private  and  his  public  life  by 
sound  principles;  who  cherishes  high  ideals; 
and  who  aims  to  train  his  children  for  a  use 
ful  life  and  for  their  country's  service." 

This  modest  and  sensible  statement  indicates 
the  existence  of  a  national  point  of  view.  We 
have  developed  in  the  course  of  time,  as  a  result 
of  certain  racial  inheritances  and  historic  expe 
riences,  a  national  "temper"  or  "ethos";  a 
more  or  less  settled  way  of  considering  intel-?; 
lectual,  moral,  and  social  problems;  in  shorty4 
peculiarly  national  attitude  toward  the 
versal  human  questions. 

[49] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

In  a  narrower  sense,  "the  American  mind" 
may  mean  the  characteristics  of  the  American  in 
telligence,  as  it  has  been  studied  by  Mr.  Bryce, 
De  Tocqueville,  and  other  trained  observers 
of  our  methods  of  thinking.  It  may  mean  the 
specific  achievements  of  the  American  intelli 
gence  in  fields  like  science  and  scholarship  and 
history.  In  all  these  particular  departments  of 
intellectual  activity  the  methods  and  the  results 
of  American  workers  have  recently  received  ex 
pert  and  by  no  means  uniformly  favorable  as 
sessment  from  investigators  upon  both  sides  of 
the  Atlantic.  But  the  observer  of  literary  pro 
cesses  and  productions  must  necessarily  take  a 
somewhat  broader  survey  of  national  tenden 
cies.  He  must  study  what  Nathaniel  Haw 
thorne,  with  the  instinct  of  a  romance  writer, 
preferred  to  call  the  "  heart"  as  distinguished 
from  the  mere  intellect.  He  must  watch  the 
moral  and  social  and  imaginative  impulses  of 
the  individual ;  the  desire  for  beauty ;  the  hunger 
for  self-expression ;  the  conscious  as  well  as  the 
unconscious  revelation  of  personality;  and  he 
must  bring  all  this  into  relation  —  if  he  can, 
and  knowing  that  the  finer  secrets  are  sure  to 
elude  him!  — with  the  age-long  impulses  of  the 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

race  and  with  the  mysterious  tides  of  feeling 
that  flood  or  ebb  with  the  changing  fortunes  of 
the  nation. 

One  way  to  begin  to  understand  the  typical 
American  is  to  take  a  look  at  him  in  Europe. 
It  does  not  require  a  professional  beggar  or 
a  licensed  guide  to  identify  him.  Not  that  the 
American  in  Europe  need  recall  in  any  partic 
ular  the  familiar  pictorial  caricature  of  "  Uncle 
Sam."  He  need  not  bear  any  outward  resem 
blances  to  such  stage  types  as  that  presented  in 
"  The  Man  From  Home."  He  need  not  even 
suggest,  by  peculiarities  of  speech  or  manner, 
that  he  has  escaped  from  the  pages  of  those 
novels  of  international  observation  in  which 
Mr.  James  and  Mr.  Howells  long  ago  at 
tained  an  unmatched  artistry.  Our  "  American 
Abroad,"  at  the  present  hour,  may  be  studied 
without  the  aid  of  any  literary  recollections 
whatever.  There  he  is,  with  his  wife  and  daugh 
ters,  and  one  may  stare  at  him  with  all  the 
frankness  of  a  compatriot.  He  is  obviously 
well-to-do,  —  else  he  would  not  be  there  at 
all,  —  and  the  wife  and  daughters  seem  very 
well-to-do  indeed.  He  is  kindly  ;  considerate 
—  sometimes  effusively  considerate  —  of  his 

[51  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

fellow  travellers ;  patient  with  the  ladies  of  his 
family,  who  in  turn  are  noticeably  patient  with 
him.  He  is  genial  —  very  willing  to  talk  with 
polyglot  headwaiters  and  chauffeurs ;  in  fact 
the  wife  and  daughters  are  also  practised  con 
versationalists,  although  their  most  loyal  ad 
mirers  must  admit  that  their  voices  are  a  trifle 
sharp  or  flat.  These  ladies  are  more  widely 
read  than  "papa."  He  has  not  had  much  lei 
sure  for  Ruskin  and  Symonds  and  Ferrero. 
His  lack  of  historical  training  limits  his  curi 
osity  concerning  certain  phases  of  his  European 
surroundings  ;  but  he  uses  his"  eyes  well  upon 
such  general  objects  as  trains,  hotel-service, 
and  Englishmen.  In  spite  of  his  habitual  gen 
iality,  he  is  rather  critical  of  foreign  ways, 
although  this  is  partly  due  to  his  lack  of  ac 
quaintance  with  them.  Intellectually,  he  is 
really  more  modest  and  self-distrustful  than 
his  conversation  or  perhaps  his  general  bearing 
would  imply ;  in  fact,  his  wife  and  daughters, 
emboldened  very  likely  by  the  training  of  their 
women's  clubs,  have  a  more  commendable 
daring  in  assaulting  new  intellectual  positions. 
Yet  the  American  does  not  lack  quickness, 
either  of  wits  or  emotion.  His  humor  and  sen- 

[  s^] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

timent  make  him  an  entertaining  companion. 
Even  when  his  spirits  run  low,  his  patriotism 
is  sure  to  mount  in  proportion,  and  he  can  al 
ways  tell  you  with  enthusiasm  in  just  how  many 
days  he  expects  to  be  back  again  in  what  he 
calls  "  God's  country." 

This,  or  something  like  this,  is  the  "Ameri 
can  "  whom  the  European  regards  with  curios 
ity,  contempt,  admiration,  or  envy,  as  the  case 
may  be,  but  who  is  incontestably  modifying 
Western  Europe,  even  if  he  is  not,  as  many 
journalists  and  globe-trotters  are  fond  of  assert 
ing,  "Americanizing"  the  world.  Interesting 
as  it  is  to  glance  at  him  against  that  European 
background  which  adds  picturesqueness  to  his 
qualities,  the  "  Man  from  Home  "  is  still  more 
interesting  in  his  native  habitat.  There  he  has 
been  visited  by  hundreds  of  curious  and  observ 
ant  foreigners,  who  have  left  on  record  a  whole 
literature  of  bewildered  and  bewildering,  irritat 
ing  and  flattering  and  amusing  testimony  con 
cerning  the  Americans.  Settlers  like  Crevecoeur 
in  the  glowing  dawn  of  the  Republic,  poets  like 
Tom  Moore,  novelists  like  Charles  Dickens, — 
other  novelists  like  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett,  — 
professional  travellers  like  Captain  Basil  Hall, 

[  53] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

students  of  contemporary  sociology  like  Paul 
Bourget  and  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells,  French  jour 
nalists,  German  professors,  Italian  admirers  of 
Colonel  Roosevelt,  political  theorists  like  De 
Tocqueville,  profound  and  friendly  observers 
like  Mr.  Bryce,  have  had,  and  will  continue  to 
have,  their  say. 

The  reader  who  tries  to  take  all  this  testi 
mony  at  its  face  value,  and  to  reconcile  its  con 
tradictions,  will  be  a  candidate  for  the  insane 
asylum.  Yet  the  testimony  is  too  amusing  to 
be  neglected  and  some  of  it  is  far  too  important 
to  be  ignored.  Mr.  John  Graham  Brooks,  after 
long  familiarity  with  these  foreign  opinions  of 
America,  has  gathered  some  of  the  most  repre 
sentative  of  them  into  a  delightful  and  stimu 
lating  volume  entitled  As  Others  See  Us.  There 
one  may  find  examples  of  what  the  foreigner 
has  seen,  or  imagined  he  has  seen,  during  his 
sojourn  in  America,  and  what  he  has  said 
about  it  afterwards.  Mr.  Brooks  is  too  char 
itable  to  our  visitors  to  quote  the  most  fan 
tastic  and  highly  colored  of  their  observations  ; 
but  what  remains  is  sufficiently  bizarre. 

The  real  service  of  such  a  volume  is  to  train 
us  in  discounting  the  remarks  made  about  us  in 

[54] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

a  particular  period  like  the  eighteen-thirties,  or 
from  observations  made  in  a  special  place,  like 
Newport,  or  under  special  circumstances,  like  a 
Bishop's  private  car.  It  helps  us  to  make  allow 
ances  for  the  inevitable  angle  of  nationality,  the 
equally  inevitable  personal  equation.  A  recent 
ambitious  book  on  America,  by  a  Washington 
journalist  of  long  residence  here,  although  of  ^ 
foreign  birth,  declares  that  "  the  chief  trait  of 
the  American  people  is  the  love  of  gain  and  the  J7i 
desire  of  wealth  acquired  through  commerce."  / 
That  is  the  opinion  of  an  expert  observer,  who 
has  had  extraordinary  chances  for  seeing  pre 
cisely  what  he  has  seen.  I  think  it,  notwith 
standing,  a  preposterous  opinion,  fully  as  pre 
posterous  as  Professor  Muensterberg's  notion 
that  America  has  latterly  grown  more  monarch 
ical  in  its  tendencies,  —  but  I  must  remember 
that,  in  my  own  case,  as  in  that  of  the  journalist 
under  consideration,  there  are  allowances  to  be 
made  for  race,  and  training,  and  natural  idiosyn- 
cracy  of  vision. 

The  native  American,  it  may  be  well  to  re 
member,  is  something  of  an  observer  himself. 
If  his  observations  upon  the  characteristics 
of  his  countrymen  are  less  piquant  than  the 

[ss] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

foreigner's,  it  is  chiefly  because  the  American 
writes,  upon  the  whole,  less  incisively  than  he 
talks.  But  incisive  native  writing  about  Ameri 
can  traits  is  not  lacking.  If  a  missionary,  say  in 
South  Africa,  has  read  the  New  York  Nation 
every  week  for  the  past  forty  years,  he  has  had 
an  extraordinary  "  moving  picture"  of  Amer 
ican  tendencies,  as  interpreted  by  indepen 
dent,  trenchant,  and  high-minded  criticism. 
That  a  file  of  the  Nation  will  convey  precisely 
the  same  impression  of  American  tendencies 
as  a  file  of  the  Sun,  for  instance,  or  the  Boston 
Evening  Transcript,  is  not  to  be  affirmed.  The 
humor  of  the  London  Punch  and  the  New 
York  Life  does  not  differ  more  radically  than 
the  aspects  of  American  civilization  as  viewed 
by  two  rival  journals  in  Newspaper  Row.  The 
complexity  of  the  material  now  collected  and 
presented  in  daily  journalism  is  so  great  that 
adequate  editorial  interpretation  is  obviously 
impossible.  All  the  more  insistently  does  this 
heterogeneous  picture  of  American  life  demand 
the  impartial  interpretation  of  the  historian,  the 
imaginative  transcription  of  the  novelist.  Hu 
morist  and  moralist,  preacher  and  mob  orator 
and  social  essayist,  shop-talk  and  talk  over  the 

[56] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

tea-cup  or  over  the  pipe,  and  the  far  more  il 
luminating  instruction  of  events,  are  fashioning 
day  by  day  the  infinitely  delicate  processes  of 
our  national  self-assessment.  Scholars  like  Mr. 
Henry  Adams  or  Mr.  James  Ford  Rhodes  will 
explain  to  us  American  life  as  it  was  during  the 
administrations  of  Jefferson  or  in  theeighteen- 
fifties.  Professor  Turner  will  expound  the  sig 
nificance  of  the  frontier  in  American  history. 
Mr.  Henry  James  will  portray  with  unrivalled 
psychological  insight  the  Europeanized  Amer 
ican  of  the  eighteen-seventies  and  eighties.  Lit 
erary  critics  like  Professor  Wendell  or  Professor 
Trent  will  deduce  from  our  literature  itself  evi 
dence  concerning  this  or  that  national  quality; 
and  all  this  mass  of  American  expert  testimony, 
itself  a  result  and  a  proof  of  national  self-aware 
ness  and  self-respect,  must  be  put  into  the  scales 
to  balance,  to  confirm,  or  to  outweigh  the  re 
ports  furnished  by  foreigners. 

I  do  not  pretend  to  be  able,  like  an  expert 
accountant,  to  draw  up  a  balance-sheet  of  na 
tional  qualities,  to  credit  or  debit  the  Amer 
ican  character  with  this  or  that  precise  quantity 
of  excellence  or  defect.  But  having  turned  the 
pages  of  many  books  about  the  United  States, 

[  57] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

and  listened  to  many  conversations  about  its 
inhabitants  in  many  states  of  the  Union,  I  ven 
ture  to  collect  a  brief  list  of  the  qualities  which 
have  been  assigned  to  us,  together  with  a  few, 
but  not,  I  trust,  too  many,  of  our  admitted 
national  defects. 

Like  that  excellent  German  who  wrote  the 
History  of  the  English  Drama  in  six  volumes, 
I  begin  with  Physical  Geography.  The  differ- 
yentiation  of  the  physical  characteristics  of  our 
^  branch  of  the  English  race  is  admittedly  due, 
part,  to  climate.  In  spite  of  the  immense 
range  of  climatic  variations  as  one  passes  from 
New  England  to  New  Orleans,  from  the  Miss 
issippi  Valley  to  the  high  plains  of  the  Far 
West,  or  from  the  rainy  Oregon  belt  south 
ward  to  San  Diego,  the  settlers  of  English 
stock  find  a  prevalent  atmospheric  condition, 
as  a  result  of  which  they  begin,  in  a  generation 
or  two,  to  change  in  physique.  They  grow 
thinner  and  more  nervous,  they  "lean  for 
ward,"  as  has  been  admirably  said  of  them, 
while  the  Englishman  "  leans  back  "  ;  they  are 
less  heavy  and  less  steady;  their  voices  are 
higher,  sharper;  their  athletes  get  more  easily 
"  on  edge";  they  respond,  in  short, to  an  exces- 

[  58] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

sively  stimulating  climate.  An  old-fashioned 
sea-captain  put  it  all  into  a  sentence  when  he 
said  that  he  could  drink  a  bottle  of  wine  with 
his  dinner  in  Liverpool  and  only  a  half  a  bottle 
in  New  York.  Explain  the  cause  as  we  may, 
the  fact  seems  to  be  that  the  body  of  John 
Bull  changes,  in  the  United  States,  into  the 
body  of  Uncle  Sam. 

There  are  mental  differences  no  less  pro 
nounced.  No  adjective  has  been  more  fre 
quently  applied  to  the  Anglo-Saxon  than  the 
word  "  dull."  The  American  mind  has  been 
accused  of  ignorance,  superficiality,  levity,com- 
monplaceness,  and  dozens  of  other  defects,  but 
"dulness"  is  not  one  of  them.  "Smartness," 
rather,  is  the  preferred  epithet  of  derogation ; 
or,  to  rise  a  little  in  the  scale  of  valuation,  it  is 
the  word  "  cleverness,"  used  with  that  lurking 
contempt  for  cleverness  which  is  truly  English 
and  which  long  survived  in  the  dialect  of  New 
England,  where  the  village  ne'er-do-well  or 
Jack-of-all-trades  used  to  be  pronounced  a 
"  clever  "  fellow.  The  variety  of  employment 
to  which  the  American  pioneers  were  oblige* 
to  betake  themselves  has  done  something, 
doubt,  to  produce  a  national  versatility, a  quid 

[  59] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

assimilation  of  new  methods  and  notions,  a 
ready  adaptability  to  novel  emergencies.  An 
invaluable  pioneer  trait  is  curiosity  ;  the  settler 
in  a  new  country,  like  Moses  in  the  wilderness 
of  Arabia,  must  "  turn  aside  to  see  "  ;  he  must 
look  into  things,  learn  to  read  signs,  —  or  else 
the  Indians  or  frost  or  freshet  will  soon  put  an 
end  to  his  pioneering.  That  curiosity  concern 
ing  strangers  which  so  much  irritated  Dickens 
and  Mrs.  Trollope  was  natural  to  the  children 
of  Western  emigrants  to  whom  the  difference 
between  Sioux  and  Pawnee  had  once  meant 
life  or  death.  "  What 's  your  business,  stranger, 
in  these  parts  ? "  was  an  instinctive,  because  it 
had  once  been  a  vital,  question.  That  it  degen 
erates  into  mere  inquisitiveness  is  true  enough  ; 
just  as  the  "acuteness,"  the  "awareness,"  es 
sential  to-  the  existence  of  one  generation  be 
comes  only"  cuteness,"  the  typical  tin-pedler's 
habit  of  mind,  in  the  generation  following. 

American  inexperience,  the  national  rawness 
and  unsophistication  which  has  impressed  so 
many  observers,  has  likewise  its  double  sig 
nificance  when  viewed  historically.   We  have 
^exhibited,  no  doubt,  the  amateurishness  and 
"recklessness  which  spring  from  relative  isola- 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

tion,  from  ignorance  as  to  how  they  manage 
elsewhere  this  particular  sort  of  thing, —  trjs 
conservation  of  forests,  let  us  say,  or  the  gov 
ernment  of  colonial  dependencies.  National"^ 
smugness  and  conceit,  the  impatience  crystal-^ 
lized  in  the  phrase,  "  What  have  we  got  to  dos , 
with  abroad  ?  "  have  jarred  upon  the  nerves  of 
many  cultivated  Americans.  But  it  is  no  lessj 
true  that  a  nation  of  pioneers  and  settlers,  like] 
the  isolated  individual,  learns  certain  rough- 
and-ready  Robinson  Crusoe  ways  of  getting 
things  done.  A  California  mining-camp  is  sure 
to  establish  law  and  order  in  due  time,  though 
never,  perhaps,  a  law  and  order  quite  accord 
ing  to  Blackstone.  In  the  most  trying  crises  of 
American  political  history,  it  was  not,  after  all, 
a  question  of  profiting  by  European  experi 
ence.  Washington  and  Lincoln,  in  their  sorest 
struggles,  had  nothing  to  do  with  "abroad"; 
the  problem  had  first  to  be  thought  through, 
and  then  fought  through,  in  American  and  not 
in  European  terms.  Not  a  half-dozen  English 
men  understood  the  bearings  of  the  Kansas- 
Nebraska  Bill,  or,  if  they  did,  we  were  little  the 
wiser.  We  had  to  wait  until  a  slow-minded 
frontier  lawyer  mastered  it  in  all  its  implica- 
[61  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

tions,  and  then  patiently  explained  it  to  the 
farmers  of  Illinois,  to  the  United  States,  and 
to  the  world. 

It  is  true  that  the  unsophisticated  mode  of 
procedure  may  turn  out  to  be  sheer  folly,  — 
a  "  sixteen  to  one  "  triumph  of  provincial  bar 
barism.  But  sometimes  it  is  the  secret  of  fresh 
ness  and  of  force.  Your  cross-country  runner 
scorns  the  highway,  but  that  is  because  he  has 
confidence  in  his  legs  and  loins,  and  he  likes 
to  take  the  fences.  Fenimore  Cooper,  when 
he  began  to  write  stories,  knew  nothing  about 
the  art  of  novel-making  as  practised  in  Eu 
rope,  but  he  possessed  something  infinitely 
better  for  him,  namely,  instinct,  and  he  took 
the  right  road  to  the  climax  of  a  narrative  as 
unerringly  as  the  homing  bee  follows  its  view 
less  trail. 

No  one  can  be  unaware  how  easily  this 
puperb  American  confidence  may  turn  to  over- 
confidence,  to  sheer  recklessness.  We  love  to 
run  past  the  signals,  in  our  railroading  and  in 
our  thinking.  Emerson  will  "plunge"  on  a 
new  idea  as  serenely  as  any  stock-gambler  ever 
"  plunged  "  in  Wall  Street,  and  a  pretty  school 
teacher  will  tell  you  that  she  has  become  an 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

advocate  of  the  "  New  Thought  "  as  compla 
cently  as  an  old  financier  will  boast  of  having 
bought  Calumet  and  Hecla  when  it  was  sell 
ing  at  25.  (Perhaps  the  school-teacher  may  get 
as  good  a  bargain.  I  cannot  say.)  Upon  the 
whole,  Americans  back  individual  guesswork 
and  pay  cheerfully  when  they  lose.  A  great 
many  of  them,  as  it  happens,  have  guessed 
right.  Even  those  who  continue  to  guess 
wrong,  like  Colonel  Sellers,  have  the  indefeas 
ible  romantic  appetite  for  guessing  again.  The 
American  temperament  and  the  chances  of 
American  history  have  brought  constant  tempt 
ation  to  speculation,  and  plenty  of  our  people' 
prefer  to  gamble  upon  what  they  love  to  call 
a  "  proposition,"  rather  than  to  go  to  the 
bottom  of  the  facts.  They  would  rather  spec 
ulate  than  know. 

Doubtless  there  are  purely  physical  causes 
that  have  encouraged  this  mental  attitude, 
such  as  the  apparently  inexhaustible  resources 
of  a  newly  opened  country,  the  conscious 
ness  of  youthful  energy,  the  feeling  that  any 
very  radical  mistake  in  pitching  camp  to-day 
can  easily  be  rectified  when  we  pitch  camp 
to-morrow.  The  habit  of  exaggeration  which 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

was  so  particularly  annoying  to  English  vis 
itors  in  the  middle  of  the  last  century — annoy 
ing  even  to  Charles  Dickens,  who  was  him 
self  something  of  an  expert  in  exuberance  — 
is  a  physical  and  moral  no  less  than  a  mental 
quality.  That  monstrous  braggadocio  which 
Dickens  properly  satirized  in  Martin  Chuz- 
zlewit  was  partly,  of  course,  the  product  of 
provincial  ignorance.  Doubtless  there  were, 
and  there  are  still,  plenty  of  Pograms  who  are 
convinced  that  Henry  Clay  and  Daniel  Web 
ster  overtop  all  the  intellectual  giants  of  the 
Old  World.  But  that  youthful  bragging,  and 
>erhaps  some  of  the  later  bragging  as  well,  has 
ts  social  side.  It  is  a  perverted  idealism.  It 
>rings  from  group  loyalty,  from  sectional 
idelity.  The  settlement  of  "  Eden  "  may  be 
precisely  what  Dickens  drew  it :  a  miasmatic 
mud-hole.  Yet  we  who  are  interested  in  the 
new  town  do  not  intend,  as  the  popular  phrase 
has  it,  "  to  give  ourselves  away."  We  back 
our  own  "  proposition,"  so  that  to  this  day 
Chicago  cannot  tell  the  truth  to  St.  Louis,  nor 
Harvard  to  Yale.  Braggadocio  thus  gets  glori 
fied  through  its  rootage  in  loyalty;  and  like 
wise  extravagance  —  surely  one  of  the  worst 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

of  American  mental  vices  —  is  often  based 
upon  a  romantic  confidence  in  individual  opin 
ion  or  in  the  righteousness  of  some  specific 
cause.  Convince  a  blue-blooded  American  like 
Wendell  Phillips  that  the  abolition  of  slavery 
is  right,  and,  straightway,  words  and  even  facts 
become  to  him  mere  weapons  in  a  splendid 
warfare.  His  statements  grow  rhetorical,  reck 
less,  virulent.  Proof  seems  to  him,  as  it  did  to 
the  contemporary  Transcendentalist  philoso 
phers,  an  impertinence.  The  sole  question  is, 
"  Are  you  on  the  Lord's  side  ? "  i.e.,  on  the 
side  of  Wendell  Phillips. 

Excuse  as  we  may  the  faults  of  a  gifted 
combatant  in  a  moral  crisis  like  the  abolition 
controversy,  the  fact  remains  that  the  intel 
lectual  dangers  of  the  oratorical  temperament 
are  typically  American.  What  is  common 
ly  called  our  "  Fourth  of  July  "  period  has 
indeed  passed  away.  It  has  few  apologists, 
perhaps  fewer  than  it  really  deserves.  It  is 
possible  to  regret  the  disappearance  of  that 
old-fashioned  assertion  of  patriotism  and  pride, 
and  to  question  whether  historical  pageants^ 
and  a  "noiseless  Fourth"  will  develop  any* 
better  citizens  than  the  fathers  were.  But  on 

[65] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

the  purely  intellectual  side,  the  influence  of 
that  spread-eagle  oratory  was  disastrous. 
Throughout  wide-extended  regions  of  the 
country,  and  particularly  in  the  South  and 
West,  the  "orator"  grew  to  be,  in  the  pop 
ular  mind,  the  normal  representative  of  intel 
lectual  ability.  Words,  rather  than  things, 
climbed  into  the  saddle.  Popular  assemblies 
were  taught  the  vocabulary  and  the  logic  of 
passion,  rather  than  of  sober,  lucid  reasoning. 
The  "  stump  "  grew  more  potent  than  school- 
house  and  church  and  bench ;  and  it  taught 
its  reckless  and  passionate  ways  to  more  than 
one  generation.  The  intellectual  leaders  of  the 
newer  South  have  more  than  once  suffered 
ostracism  for  protesting  against  this  glorifica 
tion  of  mere  oratory.  But  it  is  not  the  South 
alone  that  has  suffered.  Wherever  a  mob  can 
gather,  there  are  still  the  dangers  of  the  old 
demagogic  vocabulary  and  rhetoric.  The  mob 
state  of  mind  is  lurking  still  in  the  excitable 
American  temperament. 

The  intellectual  temptations  of  that  temper 
ament  are  revealed  no  less  in  our  popular  jour 
nalism.  This  journalism,  it  is  needless  to  say, 
is  extremely  able,  but  it  is  reckless  to  the  last 
[66] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

degree.  The  extravagance  of  its  head-lines  and 
the  over-statements  of  its  news  columns  are 
direct  sources  of  profit,  since  they  increase  the 
circulation  and  it  is  circulation  which  wins 
advertising  space.  I  think  it  is  fair  to  say  that 
the  American  people,  as  a  whole,  like  precisely 
the  sort  of  journalism  which  they  get.  The 
tastes  of  the  dwellers  in  cities  control,  more 
and  more,  the  character  of  our  newspapers. 
The  journals  of  New  York,  Chicago,  and  San 
Francisco  are  steadily  gaining  in  circulation,  in 
resourcefulness,  and  in  public  spirit,  but  they 
are,  for  the  most  part,  unscrupulous  in  attack, 
sophistical,  and  passionate.  They  outvie  the 
popular  pulpit  in  sentimentality.  They  play 
with  fire. 

The  note  of  exaggeration  which  is  heard  in 
American  oratory  and  journalism  is  struck 
again  in  the  popular  magazines.  Their  com- 
paign  of  "  exposure,"  during  the  last  decade, 
has  been  careless  of  individual  and  corporate 
rights  and  reputations.  Even  the  magazine 
sketches  and  short  stories  are  keyed  up  to  a 
hysteric  pitch.  So  universally  is  this  character 
istic  national  tension  displayed  in  our  period 
ical  literature  that  no  one  is  much  surprised  to 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

read  in  his  morning  paper  that  some  one  has 
called  the  President  of  the  United  States  a  liar, 
—  or  that  some  one  has  been  called  a  liar  by 
the  President  of  the  United  States. 

For  an  explanation  of  these  defects,  shall  we 
fall  back  upon  a  convenient  maxim  of  De 
Tocqueville's  and  admit  with  him  that  "a  de 
mocracy  is  unsuited  to  meditation"?  We  are 
forced  to  do  so.  But  then  comes  the  inevitable 
second  thought  that  a  democracy  must  needs 
have  other  things  than  meditation  to  attend  to. 
Athenian  and  Florentine  and  Versailles  types 
of  political  despotism  have  all  proved  highly 
favorable  to  the  lucubrations  of  philosophers 
and  men  of  letters  who  enjoyed  the  despot's 
approbation.  For  that  matter,  no  scheme  of 
life  was  ever  better  suited  to  meditation  than 
an  Indian  reservation  in  the  eigh teen-seven 
ties,  with  a  Great  Father  in  Washington  to  fur 
nish  blankets,  flour,  and  tobacco.  Yet  that  is 
not  quite  the  American  ideal  of  existence,  and 
it  even  failed  to  produce  the  peaceable  fruits 
of  meditation  in  the  Indian  himself. 

One  may  freely  admit  the  shortcomings  of 
the  American  intelligence;  the  "commonness 
of  mind  and  tone  "  which  Mr.  Bryce  believes 
[68] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

to  be  inseparable  from  the  presence  of  such 
masses  of  men  associated  under  modern  de 
mocratic  government ;  the  frivolity  and  extra 
vagance  which  represent  the  gasconading  of  the 
romantic  temper  in  face  of  the  grey  practical 
ities  of  everyday  routine;  the  provincial  boast- 
fulness  and  bad  taste  which  have  resulted  from 
intellectual  isolation  ;  the  lack,  in  short,  of  a 
code,  whether  for  thought  or  speech  or  beha 
vior.  And  nevertheless,  one's  instinctive  Amer 
icanism  replies,  May  it  not  be  better,  after 
all,  to  have  gone  without  a  code  for  a  while,  to 
have  lacked  that  orderly  and  methodized  and 
socialized  European  intelligence,  and  to  have 
had  the  glorious  sense  of  bringing  things  to 
pass  in  spite  of  it?  There  is  just  one  thing  that 
would  have  been  fatal  to  our  democracy.  It  is 
the  feeling  expressed  in  La  Bruyere's  famous 
book:  "Everything  has  been  said,  everything 
has  been  written,  everything  has  been  done." 
Here  in  America  everything  was  to  do  ;  we 
were  forced  to  conjugate  our  verbs  in  the  fu 
ture  tense.  No  doubt  our  existence  has  been, 
in  some  respects,  one  of  barbarism,  but  it  has 
been  the  barbarism  of  life  and  not  of  death.  A 
rawboned  baby  sprawling  on  the  mud  floor 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

of  a  Kentucky  log  cabin  is  a  more  hopeful 
spectacle  than  a  wholly  civilized  funeral. 

"  Perhaps  it  is,"  rejoins  the  European  critic, 
somewhat  impatiently,  "  but  you  are  confusing 
the  issue.  We  find  certain  grave  defects  in  the 
American  mind,  defects  which,  if  you  had  not 
had  what  Thomas  Carlyle  called  '  a  great  deal 
of  land  for  a  very  few  people/  would  long  ago 
have  involved  you  in  disaster.  You  admit  the 
mental  defects,  but  you  promptly  shift  the 
question  to  one  of  moral  qualities,  of  practical 
energy,  of  subduing  your  wilderness,  and  so 
forth.  You  have  too  often  absented  yourself 
from  the  wedding  banquet,  from  the  European 
symposium  of  wit  and  philosophy,  from  the 
polished  and  orderly  and  delightful  play  and 
interplay  of  civilized  mind,  —  and  your  excuse 
is  the  old  one  :  that  you  are  trying  your  yoke 
of  oxen  and  cannot  come.  We  charge  you  with 
intellectual  sins,  and  you  enter  the  plea  of 
moral  preoccupation.  If  you  will  permit  per 
sonal  examples,  you  Americans  have  made  ere 
now  your  national  heroes  out  of  men  whose 
reasoning  powers  remained  those  of  a  college 
sophomore,  who  were  unable  to  state  an  oppo 
nent's  position  with  fairness, who  lacked  wholly 

[70] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

the  judicial  quality,  who  were  vainglorious  and 
extravagant,  who  had,  in  short,  the  mind  of  an 
exuberant  barbarian ;  but  you  instantly  forget 
their  intellectual  defects  in  the  presence  of  their 
abounding  physical  and  moral  energy,  their 
freedom  from  any  taint  of  personal  corruption, 
their  whole-souled  desire  and  effort  for  the 
public  good.  Were  not  such  heroes,  impossi 
ble  as  they  would  have  been  in  any  other  civ 
ilized  country,  perfectly  illuminative  of  your 
national  state  of  mind?" 

For  one,  I  confess  that  I  do  not  know  what 
reply  to  make  to  my  imaginary  European  critic. 
I  suspect  that  he  is  right.  At  any  rate,  we  stand 
here  at  the  fork  of  the  road.  If  we  do  not  wish  to 
linger  any  longer  over  a  catalogue  of  intellectual 
sins,  let  us  turn  frankly  to  our  moral  preoccu 
pations,  comforting  ourselves,  if  we  like,  as  we 
abandon  the  field  of  purely  intellectual  rivalry 
with  Europe,  in  the  reflection  that  it  is  the 
muddle-headed  Anglo-Saxon,  after  all,  who  is 
the  dominant  force  in  the  modern  world. 

The  moral  temper  of  the  American  people 
has  been  analyzed  no  less  frequently  than  their 
mental  traits.  Foreign  and  native  observers  are 
alike  agreed  in  their  recognition  of  the  extra- 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

I  ordinary  American  energy.  The  sheer  power 
of  the  American  bodily  machine,  driven  by  the 
American  will,  is  magnificent.  It  is  often  driven 
too  hard,  and  with  reckless  disregard  of  any 
thing  save  immediate  results.  It  wears  out  more 
quickly  than  the  bodily  machine  of  the  English 
man.  It  is  typical  that  the  best  distance  runners 
of  Great  Britain  usually  beat  ours,  while  we  beat 
them  in  the  sprints.  Our  public  men  are  fre 
quently —  as  the  athletes  say  —  "all  in  "  at 
sixty.  Their  energy  is  exhausted  at  just  the  time 
that  many  an  English  statesman  begins  his  best 
public  service.  But  after  making  every  allow 
ance  for  wasteful  excess,  for  the  restless  and  im 
patient  consumption  of  nervous  forces  which 

\  nature  intended  that  we  should  hold  in  reserve, 
the  fact  remains  that  American  history  has  de 
monstrated  the  existence  of  a  dynamic  national 
fcnergy,  physical  and  moral,  which  is  still  un 
abated.  Immigration  has  turned  hitherward  the 
feet  of  millions  upon  millions  of  young  men 
from  the  hardiest  stocks  of  Europe.  They  re 
plenish  the  slackening  streams  of  vigor.  When 
the  northern  New  Englander  cannot  make  a 
living  on  the  old  farm,  the  French  Canadian 
takes  it  off  his  hands,  and  not  only  improves 

E?^  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MINI? 

the  farm,  but  raises  big  crops  of  boy  s.  So  with 
Italians,  Swedes,  Germans,  Irish,  Jews,  and 
Portuguese,  and  all  the  rest.  We  are  a  nation 
of  immigrants,  a  digging,  hewing,  building, 
breeding,  bettering  race,  of  mixed  blood  and 
varying  creeds,  but  of  fundamental  faith  in  the 
wages  of  going  on ;  a  race  compounded  of  ma 
terials  crude  but  potent ;  raw,  but  with  blood 
that  is  red  and  bones  that  are  big ;  a  race  that  is 
accomplishing  its  vital  tasks,  and,  little  by  little, 
transmuting  brute  forces  and  material  energies 
into  the  finer  play  of  mind  and  spirit. 
v  j  From  the  very  beginning,  the  American  X  I 
people  have  been  characterized  by  idealism.  It] 
was  the  inner  light  of  Pilgrim  and  Quaker  col 
onists  ;  it  gleams  no  less  in  the  faces  of  the  child 
ren  of  Russian  Jew  immigrants  to-day.  Amer 
ican  irreverence  has  been  noted  by  many  a  for 
eign  critic,  but  there  are  certain  subjects  in 
whose  presence  our  reckless  or  cynical  speech 
is  hushed.  Compared  with  current  Continental 
humor,  our  characteristic  American  humor  is 
peculiarly  reverent.  The  purity  of  woman 
the  reality  of  religion  are  not  considered  topics 
for  jocosity.  Cleanness  of  body  and  of  mind  are 
held  by  our  young  men  to  be  not  only  desirable 

[73] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

but  attainable  virtues.  There  is  among  us,  in 
comparison  with  France  or  Germany,  a  defect 
ive  reverence  for  the  State  as  such ;  and  a 
positive  irreverence  towards  the  laws  of  the 
Commonwealth,  and  towards  the  occupants  of 
high  political  positions.  Mayor,  Judge,  Gov 
ernor,  Senator,  or  even  President,  may  be  the 
butt  of  such  indecorous  ridicule  as  shocks  or 
disgusts  the  foreigner;  but  nevertheless  the 
personal  joke  stops  short  of  certain  topics  which 
Puritan  tradition  disapproves.  The  United 
States  is1  properly  called  a  Christian  nation, 
V  not  merely  because  the  Supreme  Court  has  so 
affirmed  it,  but  because  the  phrase  "a  Christ 
ian  nation"  expresses  the  historical  form  which 
the  religious  idealism  of  the  country  has  made 
its  own.  The  Bible  is  still  considered,  by  the 
mass  of  the  people,  a  sacred  book ;  oaths  in 
courts  of  law,  oaths  of  persons  elected  to  great 
office,  are  administered  upon  it.  American 
faith  in  education,  as  all  the  world  knows,  has 
from  the  beginning  gone  hand  in  hand  with 
faith  in  religion ;  the  school-house  was  almost 
as  sacred  a  symbol  as  the  meeting-house ;  and 
the  munificence  of  American  private  benefac 
tions  to  the  cause  of  education  furnishes  to- 

[74] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

day  one  of  the  most  striking  instances  of  ideal 
ism  in  the  history  of  civilization. 

The  ideal  passions  of  patriotism,  of  liberty,  y 
of  loyalty  to  home  and  section,  of  humanitarian 
and  missionary  effort,  have  all  burned  with  a 
clear  flame  in  the  United  States.  The  optim 
ism  which  lies  so  deeply  embedded  in  the  / 
American  character  is  one  phase  of  the  na-  * 
tional  mind.  Charles  Eliot  Norton  once  said 
to  me,  with  his  dry  humor,  that  there  was  an 
infallible  test  of  the  American  authorship  of 
any  anonymous  article  or  essay  :  "  Does  it  con 
tain  the  phrase  '  After  all,  we  need  not  des 
pair*  ?  If  it  does,  it  was  written  by  an  Amer 
ican."  In  spite  of  all  that  is  said  about  the 
practicality  of  the  American,  his  love  of  gain 
and  his  absorption  in  material  interests,  those 
who  really  know  him  are  aware  how  habitually 
he  confronts  his  practical  tasks  in  a  spirit  of 
romantic  enthusiasm.  He  marches  downtown 
to  his  prosaic  day's  job  and  calls  it  "playing 
the  game  "  ;  to  work  as  hard  as  he  can  is  to 
"get  into  the  game/'  and  to  work  as  long  as 
he  can  is  to  "stay  in  the  game  " ;  he  loves  to 
win  fully  as  much  as  the  Jew  and  he  hates  to 
lose  fully  as  much  as  the  Englishman,  but 

[75] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

losing  or  winning,  he  carries  into  his  business 
activity  the  mood  of  the  idealist. 

It  is  easy  to  think  of  all  this  as  self-decep 
tion  ;  as  the  emotipnal  effusiveness  of  the 
American  temperament ;  but  Jo  refuse  to  see 
its  idealism^  is  to  mistake  fundamentally  the 
character  of  the  American  man.  No  doubt  he 
does  deceive  himself  often  as  to  his  real  mo 
tives  :  he  is  a  mystic  and  a  bargain-hunter  by 
turns.  Divided  aims,  confused  ideals,  have 
struggled  for  the  mastery  among  us,  ever  since 
Challon's  Voyage^  in  1 606,  announced  that  the 
purpose  of  the  first  colonists  to  Virginia  was 
"both  to  seek  to  convert  the  savages,  as  also 
to  seek  out  what  benefits  or  commodities 
might  be  had  in  those  parts."  How  that 
"  both  "  —  "  as  also  "  keeps  echoing  in  Amer 
ican  history :  "  both  "  to  christianize  the  Negro 
and  work  him  at  a  profit,  "  both  "  duty  and 
advantage  in  retaining  the  Philippines;  "both" 
international  good  will  and  increased  arma 
ments  ;  "  both  "  Sunday  morning  precepts  and 
Monday  morning  practice  ;  "  both"  horns  of 
a  dilemma  ;  "  both  God  and  mammon  "  ;  did 
ever  a  nation  possess  a  more  marvellous 
water-tight  compartment  method  of  believing 

[76] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

and  honoring  opposites !  But  in  all  this  un 
conscious  hypocrisy  the  American  is  perhaps 
not  worse  —  though  he  may  be  more  absurd! 
—  than  other  men. 

Another  aspect  of  the  American  mind  is 
found  in  our  radicalism.  "  To  be  an  Amer-  \, 
ican,"  it  has  been  declared,  "is  to  be  a  radical/' 
That  statement  needs  qualification.  Intellect 
ually  the  American  is  inclined  to  radical  views ; 
he  is  willing  to  push  certain  social  theories 
very  far ;  he  will  found  a  new  religion,  a  new 
philosophy,  a  new  socialistic  community,  at 
the  slightest  notice  or  provocation;  but  he  has 
at  bottom  a  fund  of  moral  and  political  con 
servatism.  Thomas  Jefferson,  one  of  the  great 
est  of  our  radical  idealists,  had  a  good  deal  of 
the  English  squire  in  him  after  all.  Jefferson- 
ianism  endures,  not  merely  because  it  is  a  rad 
ical  theory  of  human  nature,  but  because  it 
expresses  certain  facts  of  humar^  nature.  The 
American  mind  looks  forward,  not  back ;  but 
in  practical  details  of  land,  taxes,  and  govern- 
mental  machinery  we  are  instinctively  cautious 
of  change.  The  State  of  Connecticut  knows 
that  her  constitution  is  ill  adapted  to  the  pre 
sent  conditions  of  her  population,  but  the  dif- 

[77] 


• 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

ficulty  is  to  persuade  the  rural  legislators  to 
amend  it.  Yet  everybody  admits  that  amend 
ment  will  come  "some  day."  This  admission 
is  a  characteristic  note  of  American  feeling ; 
and  every  now  and  then  come  what  we  call 
"  uplift "  movements,  when  radicalism  is  in 
the  very  air,  and  a  thousand  good  "  causes  " 
take  fresh  vigor. 

One  such  period  was  in  the  New  England 
of  the  eighteen-forties.  We  are  moving  in  a 
similar  —  only  this  time  a  national  —  current 
of  radicalism,  to-day.  But  a  change  in  the 
weather  or  the  crops  has  before  now  turned 
many  of  our  citizens  from  radicalism  into  con 
servatism.  There  is,  in  fact,  conservatism  in 
our  blood  and  radicalism  in  our  brains,  and 
now  one  and  now  the  other  rules.  Very  typ 
ical  of  American  radicalism  is  that  story  of  the 
old  sea-captain  who  was  ignorant,  as  was  sup 
posed,  of  the  science  of  navigation,  and  who 
cheerfully  defended  himself  by  saying  that  he 
could  work  his  vessel  down  to  Boston  Light 
without  knowing  any  navigation,  and  after  that 
he  could  go  where  he  "  dum  pleased."  I  sus 
pect  the  old  fellow  pulled  his  sextant  and 
chronometer  out  of  his  chest  as  soon  as  he 

[78  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

really  needed  them.  American   radicalism  is\ 
not  always  as  innocent  of  the  world's  expe-  1 
rience  as  it  looks.  In  fact,  one  of  the  most<  \J 
interesting  phases   of  this  twentieth  century) 
"  uplift "  movement  is  its  respect  and  even! 
glorification  of  expert  opinion.  A  German  ex 
pert  in  city-planning  electrifies  an  audience  of 
Chicago  club-women  by  talking  to  them  about 
drains,  ash-carts,  and  flower-beds.  A  hundred 
other  experts,  in  sanitation,  hygiene,  chemis 
try,  conservation  of  natural  resources,  govern 
ment  by  commission,  tariffs,  arbitration  treat 
ies,  are  talking  quite  as  busily  ;  and  they  have 
the  attention   of  a  national   audience  that  is 
listening  with  genuine  modesty,  and  with  a  real 
desire  to  refashion  American  life  on  wiser  and 
nobler  plans.  In  this  national  forward  move 
ment  in  which  we  are   living,  radicalism  has 
shown  its  beneficent  aspect   of  constructive 
idealism. 

No  catalogue  of  American  qualities  and  de 
fects  can  exclude  the  trait  of  individualism. 
We  exalt  character  over  institutions,  says  Mr. 
Brownell ;  we  like  our  institutions  because  they 
suit  us,  and  not  because  we  admire  institutions. 
"  Produce  great  persons,"  declares  Walt  Whit- 

[79] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

man,  "  the  rest  follows."  Whether  the  rest  fol 
lows  or  not,  there  can  be  no  question  that 
Americans,  from  the  beginning,  have  laid  sin 
gular  stress  upon  personal  qualities.  The  relig 
ion  and  philosophy  of  the  Puritans  were  in 
this  respect  at  one  with  the  gospel  of  the  fron 
tier.  It  was  the  principle  of  "every  man  for 
himself" ;  solitary  confrontation  of  his  God, 
solitary  struggle  with  the  wilderness.  "  He 
that  will  not  work,"  declared  John  Smith  after 
that  first  disastrous  winter  at  Jamestown, 
"  neither  let  him  eat."  The  pioneer  must 
clear  his  own  land,  harvest  his  own  crops, 
defend  his  own  fireside;  his  temporal  and 
eternal  salvation  were  strictly  his  own  affair. 
He  asked,  and  expected,  no  aid  from  the  com 
munity;  he  could  at  most  "change  works" 
in  time  of  harvest,  with  a  neighbor,  if  he  had 
one.  It  was  the  sternest  school  of  self-reliance, 
from  babyhood  to  the  grave,  that  human 
society  is  ever  likely  to  witness.  It  bred  he 
roes  and  cranks  and  hermits ;  its  glories  and 
its  eccentricities  are  written  in  the  pages  of 
Emerson,  Thoreau,  and  Whitman ;  they  are 
written  more  permanently  still  in  the  instinct 
ive  American  faith  in  individual  manhood. 

[so] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

Our  democracy  idolizes  a  few  individuals ;  it 
ignores  their  defective  training,  or,  it  may  be, 
their  defective  culture;  it  likes  to  think  of  an 
Andrew  Jackson  who  was  a  "  lawyer,  judge, 
planter,  merchant,  general,  and  politician,"  be 
fore  he  became  President;  it  asks  only  that  the 
man  shall  not  change  his  individual  character 
in  passing  from  one  occupation  or  position  to 
another ;  in  fact,  it  is  amused  and  proud  to 
think  of  Grant  hauling  cordwood  to  market,  of 
Lincoln  keeping  store  or  Roosevelt  round- 
ing-up  cattle.  The  one  essential  question  was 
put  by  Hawthorne  into  the  mouth  of  Holgravc 
in  the  House  of  the  Seven  Gables.  Holgrave  had 
been  by  turns  a  schoolmaster,  clerk  in  a  store, 
editor,  pedler,  lecturer  on  Mesmerism,  and 
daguerreotypist,  but  "  amid  all  these  personal 
vicissitudes,"  says  Hawthorne,  "  he  had  never 
lost  his  identity.  .  .  .  He  had  never  violated 
the  innermost  man,  but  had  carried  his  con 
science  along  with  him."  There  speaks  the 
local  accent  of  Puritanism,  but  the  voice  insist 
ing  upon  the  moral  integrity  of  the  individual 
is  the  undertone  of  America. 

^Finally,  and  surely  not  the  least  notable  of 

American  traits,  is  public  spirit.  Triumphant 

[81  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

individualism  checks  itself,  or  is  rudely  checked 
in  spite  of  itself,  by  considerations  of  the  gen 
eral  good.  How  often  have  French  critics  con 
fessed,  with  humiliation,  that  in  spite  of  the 
superior  socialization  of  the  French  intelligence, 
France  has  yet  to  learn  from  America  the  art 
and  habit  of  devoting  individual  fortunes  to 
the  good  of  the  community.  Our  American 
literature,  as  has  been  already  pointed  out,  is 
characteristically  a  citizen  literature,  responsive 
to  the  civic  note,  the  production  of  men  who, 
like  the  writers  of  the  Federalist,  applied  a  vig 
orous  practical  intelligence,  a  robust  common 
sense,  to  questions  affecting  the  interest  of 
everybody.  The  spirit  of  fair  play  in  our  free 
democracy  has  led  Americans  to  ask  not  merely 
/I  what  is  right  and  just  for  one,  the  individual, 
V|  but  what  are  righteousness  and  justice  and  fair 
play  for  all.  Democracy,  as  embodied  in  such 
a  leader  as  Lincoln,  has  meant  Fellowship. 
Nothing  finer  can  be  said  of  a  representative 
American  than  to  say  of  him,  as  Mr.  Norton 
said  of  Mr.  Lowell,  that  he  had  a  "  most  pub 
lic  soul." 

No  one  can  present  such  a  catalogue  of 
American  qualities  as  I  have  attempted  without 
[8a] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

realizing  how  much  escapes  his  classification. 
Conscious  criticism  and  assessment  of  national 
characteristics  is  essential  to  an  understanding 
of  them ;  but  one  feels  somehow  that  the  net  is 
not  holding.  The  analysis  of  English  racial  in 
heritances,  as  modified  by  historical  conditions, 
yields  much,  no  doubt ;  but  what  are  we  to  say 
of  such  magnificent  embodiments  of  the  Amer 
ican  spirit  as  are  revealed  in  the  Swiss  immi 
grant  Agassiz,  the  German  exile  Carl  Schurz, 
the  native-born  mulatto  Booker  Washington  ? 
The  Americanism  of  representative  Americans 
is  something  which  must  be  felt ;  it  is  to  be 
reached  by  imaginative  perception  and  sym 
pathy,  no  less  than  by  the  process  of  formal 
analysis.  It  would  puzzle  the  experts  in  racial 
tendencies  to  find  arithmetically  the  common 
denominator  of  such  American  figures  as  Frank- 

o 

lin,  Washington,  Jackson,  Webster,  Lee,  Lin 
coln,  Emerson,  and  "Mark  Twain*';  yet  the 
countrymen  of  those  typical  Americans  instinct 
ively  recognize  in  them  a  sort  of  largeness, 
genuineness,  naturalness,  kindliness,  humor, 
effectiveness,  idealism,  which  are  indubitably 
and  fundamentally  American. 

There  are  certain  sentiments  of  which  we 

[83  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MINDA 

ourselves  are  conscious,  though  we  can  scarcely 
translate  them  into  words,  and  these  vaguely 
felt  emotions  of  admiration,  of  effort,  of  fellow 
ship  and  social  faith  are  the  invisible  America. 
Take,  for  a  single  example,  the  national  admira 
tion  for  what  we  call  a  "  self-made  "  man  :  here 
is  a  boy  selling  candy  and  newspapers  on  a 
Michigan  Central  train;  he  makes  up  his  mind 
to  be  a  lawyer ;  in  twelve  years  from  that  day 
he  is  general  counsel  for  the  Michigan  Central 
road ;  he  enters  the  Senate  of  the  United  States 
and  becomes  one  of  its  leading  figures.  The  in 
stinctive  flush  of  sympathy  and  pride  with  which 
Americans  listen  to  such  a  story  is  far  more 
deeply  based  than  any  vulgar  admiration  for 
money-making  abilities.  No  one  cares  whether 
such  a  man  is  rich  or  poor.  He  has  vindicated 
anew  the  possibilities  of  manhood  under  Amer 
ican  conditions  of  opportunity  ;  the  miracle  of 
our  faith  has  in  him  come  true  once  more. 

No  one  can  understand  America  with  his 
brains.  It  is  too  big,  too  puzzling.  It  tempts, 
and  it  deceives.  But  many  an  illiterate  immi 
grant  has  felt  the  true  America  in  his  pulses 
before  he  ever  crossed  the  Atlantic.  The  de 
scendant  of  the  Pilgrims  still  remains  ignorant 

[84] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

of  our  national  life  if  he  does  not  respond  to  its 
glorious  zest,  its  throbbing  energy,  its  forward 
urge,  its  uncomprehending  belief  in  the  future, 
its  sense  of  the  fresh  and  mighty  world  just 
beyond  to-day's  horizon.  Whitman's  "  Pio 
neers,  O  Pioneers  "  is  one  of  the  truest  of 
American  poems  because  it  beats  with  the  pulse 
of  this  onward  movement,  because  it  is  full  of 
this  laughing  and  conquering  fellowship  and 
of  undefeated  faith. 


Ill 

American  Idealism 

OUR  endeavor  to  state  the  general  character 
istics  of  the  American  mind  has  already  given 
us  some  indication  of  what  Americans  really 
care  for.  The  things  or  the  qualities  which 
they  like,  the  objects  of  their  conscious  or  un 
conscious  striving,  are  their  ideals.  "There 
is  what  I  call  the  American  idea,"  said  Theo 
dore  Parker  in  the  Anti-Slavery  Convention 
of  1850.  "This  idea  demands,  as  the  proxim 
ate  organization  thereof,  a  democracy  —  that 
is,  a  government  of  all  the  people,  by  all  the 
people,  for  all  the  people ;  of  course,  a  govern 
ment  on  the  principle  of  eternal  justice,  the 
unchanging  law  of  God  ;  for  shortness*  sake,  I 
will  call  it  the  idea  of  Freedom."  That  is  one 
of  a  thousand  definitions  of  American  idealism. 
Books  devoted  to  the  "Spirit  of  America" — 
like  the  volume  by  'Henry  van  Dyke  which 
bears  that  very  title  —  give  a  programme  of 
[86] 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

national  accomplishments  and  aspirations.  But 
our  immediate  task  is  more  specific.  It  is  to 
point  out  how  adequately  this  idealistic  side  of 
the  national  temperament  has  been  expressed 
in  American  writing.  Has  our  literature  kept 
equal  pace  with  our  thinking  and  feeling  ? 

We  do  not  need,  in  attempting  to  answer 
this  question,  any  definition  of  idealism,  in  its 
philosophical  or  in  its  more  purely  literary 
sense.  There  are  certain  fundamental  human 
sentiments  which  lift  men  above  brutes,  French 
men  above  "  frog-eaters,"  and  Englishmen 
above  "  shop-keepers/'  These  ennobling  senti 
ments  or  ideals,  while  universal  in  their  essen 
tial  nature,  assume  in  each  civilized  nation  a 
somewhat  specific  coloring.  The  national  lit 
erature  reveals  the  myriad  shades  and  hues  of 
private  and  public  feeling,  and  the  more  truth 
ful  this  literary  record,  the  more  delicate  and 
noble  become  the  harmonies  of  local  and  na 
tional  thought  or  emotion  with  the  universal 
instincts  and  passions  of  mankind.  On  the 
other  hand,  when  the  literature  of  Spain,  for 
instance,  or  of  Italy,  fails,  within  a  given  period, 
in  range  and  depth  of  human  interest,  we  are 
compelled  to  believe  either  that  the  Spain  or 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

Italy  of  that  age  was  wanting  in  the  nobler 
ideals,  or  that  it  lacked  literary  interpretation. 

In  the  case  of  America  we  are  confronted  by 
a  similar  dilemma.  Since  the  beginning  of  the 
seventeenth  century  this  country  has  been,  in 
a  peculiar  sense,  the  home  of  idealism  ;  but  our 
literature  has  remained  through  long  periods 
thin  and  provincial,  barren  in  cosmopolitan 
significance;  and  the  hard  fact  faces  us  to-day 
that  only  three  or  four  of  our  writers  have 
aroused  any  strong  interest  in  the  cultivated 
readers  of  continental  Europe.  Evidently,  then, 
either  the  torch  of  American  idealism  does  not 
burn  as  brightly  as  we  think,  or  else  our  writ 
ers,  with  but  few  exceptions,  have  not  hitherto 
possessed  the  height  and  reach  and  grasp  to 
hold  up  the  torch  so  that  the  world  could  see 
it.  Let  us  look  first  at  the  flame,  and  then  at 
the  torch-bearers. 

Readers  of  Carlyle  have  often  been  touched 
by  the  humility  with  which  that  disinherited 
child  of  Calvinism  speaks  of  Goethe's  doctrine 
of  the  "  Three  Reverences/'  as  set  forth  in  Wil- 
helm  Meister.  Again  and  again,  in  his  corre 
spondence  and  his  essays,  does  Carlyle  recur 
to  that  teaching  of  the  threefold  Reverence  : 
[88] 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

Reverence  for  what  is  above  us,  for  what  is 
around  us  and  for  what  is  under  us;  that  is  to 
say,  the  ethnic  religion  which  frees  us  from  de 
basing  fear,  the  philosophical  religion  which 
unites  us  with  our  comrades,  and  the  Christian 
religion  which  recognizes  humility  and  poverty 
and  suffering  as  divine. 

"  To  which  of  these  religions  do  you  speci 
ally  adhere  ? "  inquired  Wilhelm. 

"  To  all  the  three,"  replied  the  sages  ;  "  for 
in  their  union  they  produce  what  may  properly 
be  called  the  true  Religion.  Out  of  those  three 
Reverences  springs  the  highest  Reverence, 
Reverence  for  Oneself." 

An  admirable  symbolism,  surely;  vaguer, 
no  doubt,  than  the  old  symbols  which  Carlyle 
had  learned  in  the  Kirk  at  Ecclefechan,  but 
less  vague,  in  turn,  than  that  doctrine  of  rever 
ence  for  the  Oversoul,  which  was  soon  to  be 
taught  at  Concord. 

As  one  meditates  upon  the  idealism  of  the 
first  colonists  in  America,  one  is  tempted  to  ask 
what  their  "  reverences  "  were.  Toward  what 
tangible  symbols  of  the  invisible  did  their  eyes 
instinctively  turn  ? 

For  New  England,  at  least,  the  answer  is 

[  89] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

relatively  simple.  One  form  of  it  is  contained 
in  John  Adams's  well-known  prescription  for 
Virginia,  as  recorded  in  his  Diary  for  July  21, 
1786.  "Major  Langbourne  dined  with  us 
again.  He  was  lamenting  the  difference  of  char 
acter  between  Virginia  and  New  England.  I 
offered  to  give  him  a  receipt  for  making  a  New 
England  in  Virginia.  He  desired  it;  and  I  re 
commended  to  him  town-meetings,  training- 
days,  town-schools,  and  ipinisters." 

The  "  ministers,"  it  will  be  noticed,  come 
last  on  the  Adams  list.  But  the  order  of  pre 
cedence  is  unimportant. 

Here  are  four  symbols,  or,  if  you  like, cc  re 
verences.'*  Might  not  the  Virginia  planters, 
loyal  to  their  own  specific  symbol  of  the  "  gen 
tleman," —  no  unworthy  ideal,  surely;  one 
that  had  been  glorified  in  European  literature 
ever  since  Castiligione  wrote  his  Courtier,  and 
one  that  had  been  transplanted  from  England 
to  Virginia  as  soon  as  Sir  Walter  Raleigh's  men 
set  foot  on  the  soil  which  took  its  name  from 
the  Virgin  Queen,  —  might  not  the  Virginia 
gentlemen  have  pondered  to  their  profit  over 
the  blunt  suggestion  of  the  Massachusetts  com 
moner  ?  No  doubt ;  and  yet  how  much  pictur- 

[  90']     ' 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

esqueness  and  nobility  —  and  tragedy,  too  — 
we  should  have  missed,  if  our  history  had  not 
been  full  of  these  varying  symbols,  clashing 
ideals,  different  Reverences! 

One  Reverence,  at  least,  was  common  to  the 
Englishman  of  Virginia  and  to  the  Englishman 
of  Plymouth  and  Massachusetts  Bay.  They 
were  joint  heirs  of  the  Reformation,  children  of 
that  waxing  and  puissant  England  which  was  a 
nation  of  one  book,  the  Bible ;  a  book  whose 
phrases  color  alike  the  Faerie  §>ueen  of  Spen 
ser  and  the  essays  of  Francis  Bacon;  a  book 
rich  beyond  all  others  in  human  experience; 
full  of  poetry,  history,  drama;  the  test  of  con 
duct  ;  the  manual  of  devotion ;  and  above  all, 
and  blinding  all  other  considerations  by  the 
very  splendor  of  the  thought,  a  book  believed 
to  be  the  veritable  Word  of  the  unseen  God. 
For  these  colonists  in  the  wilderness,  as  for  the 
Protestant  Europe  which  they  had  left  irrevo 
cably  behind  them,  the  Bible  was  the  plainest 
of  all  symbols  of  idealism :  it  was  the  first  of 
the  "  Reverences/' 

The  Church  was  a  symbol  likewise,  but  to 
the  greater  portion  of  colonial  America  the 
Church  meant  chiefly  the  tangible  band  of 

[91  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

militant  believers  within  the  limits  of  a  certain 
township  or  parish,  rather  than  the  mystical 
Bride  of  Christ.  Except  in  Maryland  and  Vir 
ginia,  whither  the  older  forms  of  Church  wor 
ship  were  early  transplanted,  there  was  scanty 
reverence  for  the  Establishment.  There  was 
neither  clergyman  nor  minister  on  board  the 
Mayflower.  In  Rufus  Choate's  oration  on  the 
Pilgrims  before  the  New  England  Society  of 
New  York  in  1843,  occurred  the  famous  sen 
tence  about  "  a  church  without  a  bishop  and  a 
state  without  a  King  "  ;  to  which  Dr.  Wain- 
wright,  rector  of  St.  John's,  replied  wittily  at 
the  dinner  following  the  oration  that  there 
"  can  be  no  church  without  a  bishop."  This  is 
perhaps  a  question  for  experts  ;  but  Thomas 
Hooker,  Thomas  Shepard,  and  John  Cotton 
would  have  sided  with  Rufus  Choate.  The  awe 
which  had  once  been  paid  to  the  Establishment 
was  transferred,  in  the  seventeenth-century 
New  England,  to  the  minister.  The  minister 
imposed  himself  upon  the  popular  imagination, 
partly  through  sheer  force  of  personal  ascend 
ency,  and  partly  as  a  symbol  of  the  theocracy, 
—  the  actual  governing  of  the  Commonwealth 
by  the  laws  and  spirit  of  the  sterner  Scriptures. 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

The  minister  dwelt  apart  as  upon  an  awful 
Sinai.  It  was  no  mere  romantic  fancy  of  Haw 
thorne  that  shadowed  his  countenance  with  a 
black  veil.  The  church  organization,  too,  — 
though  it  may  have  lacked  its  bishop,  —  had 
a  despotic  power  over  its  communicants  ;  to  be 
cast  out  of  its  fellowship  involved  social  and 
political  consequences  comparable  to  those  fol 
lowing  excommunication  by  the  Church  of 
Rome.  Hawthorne  and  Whittier  and  Long 
fellow  —  all  of  them  sound  antiquarians, 
though  none  of  them  in  sympathy  with  the 
theology  of  Puritanism  —  have  described  in 
fit  terms  the  bareness  of  the  New  England 
meeting-house.  What  intellectual  severity  and 
strain  was  there  ;  what  prodigality  of  learning; 
what  blazing  intensity  of  devotion ;  what  pathos 
of  women's  patience,  and  of  children,  prema 
turely  old,  stretched  upon  the  rack  of  insoluble 
problems !  What  dramas  of  the  soul  were 
played  through  to  the  end  in  those  barn-like 
buildings,  where  the  musket,  perhaps,  stood  in 
the  corner  of  the  pew  !  "  How  aweful  is  this 
place  ! ''  must  have  been  murmured  by  the 
lips  of  all ;  though  there  were  many  who  have 
added,  "  This  is  the  gate  of  Heaven/' 

[93] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

4  The  gentler  side  of  colonial  religion  is  win- 
ningly  portrayed  in  Whittier's  Pennsylvania 
Pilgrim  and  in  his  imaginary  journal  of  Mar 
garet  Smith.  There  were  sunnier  slopes,  warmer 
exposures  for  the  ripening  of  the  human  spirit, 
in  the  Southern  colonies.  Even  in  New  Eng 
land  there  was  sporadic  revolt  from  the  begin 
ning.  The  number  of  non-church-members  in 
creased  rapidly  after  1700;  Franklin  as  a  youth 
in  Boston  admired  Cotton  Mather's  ability,  but 
he  did  not  go  to  church,  "  Sunday  being  my 
studying  day."  Doubtless  there  were  always 
humorous  sceptics  like  Mrs.  Stowe's  delight 
ful  Sam  Lawson  in  Oldtown  Folks.  Lawson's 
comment  on  Parson  Simpson's  service  epitom 
izes  two  centuries  of  New  England  thinking. 
"Wai,"  said  Sam,  "Parson  Simpson's  a  smart 
man ;  but  I  tell  ye,  it 's  kind  o'  discouragin'. 
Why,  he  said  our  state  and  condition  by  natur 
was  just  like  this.  We  was  clear  down  in  a  well 
fifty  feet  deep,  and  the  sides  all  round  nothin' 
but  glare  ice ;  but  we  was  under  immediate  ob 
ligations  to  get  out,  'cause  we  was  free,  volun 
tary  agents.  But  nobody  ever  had  got  out,  and 
nobody  would,  unless  the  Lord  reached  down 
and  took  'em.  And  whether  he  would  or  not 

[94] 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

nobody  could  tell;  it  was  all  sovereignty.  He 
said  there  wan't  one  in  a  hundred,  not  one  in 
a  thousand,  —  not  one  in  ten  thousand,  —  that 
would  be  saved.  Lordy  massy,  says  I  to  myself, 
ef  that 's  so  they  're  any  of  'em  welcome  to  my 
chance.  And  so  I  kind  oJ  ris  up  and  come  out" 

Mrs.  Stowe's  novel  is  fairly  representative 
of  a  great  mass  of  derivative  literature  which 
draws  its  materials  from  the  meeting-house 
period  of  American  history.  But  the  direct  lit 
erature  of  that  period  has  passed  almost  wholly 
into  oblivion.  Jonathan  Edwards  had  one  of 
the  finest  minds  of  his  century;  no  European 
standard  of  comparison  is  too  high  for  him  ;  he 
belongs  with  Pascal,  with  Augustine,  if  you  like, 
with  Dante.  But  his  great  treatises  written  in 
the  Stockbridge  woods  are  known  only  to  a  few 
technical  students  of  philosophy.  One  terrible 
sermon,  preached  at  Enfield  in  1741,  is  still 
read  by  the  curious ;  but  scarcely  anybody  knows 
of  the  ineffable  tenderness,  dignity,  and  pathos 
of  his  farewell  sermon  to  his  flock  at  North 
ampton  :  and  the  Yale  Library  possesses  nearly 
twelve  hundred  of  Edwards's  sermons  which 
have  never  been  printed  at  all.  Nor  does  any 
body,  save  here  and  there  an  antiquarian,  read 

[95  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

Shepard  and  Hooker  and  Mayhew.  And  yet 
these  preachers  and  their  successors  furnished 
the  emotional  equivalents  of  great  prose  and 
verse  to  generations  of  men.  "That  is  poetry," 
says  Professor  Saintsbury  (in  a  dangerous  lat- 
itudinarianism,  perhaps!),  "which  gives  the 
reader  the  feeling  of  poetry."  Here  we  touch 
one  of  the  fundamental  characteristics  of  our 
national  state  of  mind,  in  its  relation  to  litera 
ture.  We  are  careless  of  form  and  type,  yet  we 
crave  the  emotional  stimulus.  Milton,  greatest 
of  Puritan  poets,  was  read  and  quoted  all  too 
seldom  in  the  Puritan  colonies,  and  yet  those 
colonists  were  no  strangers  to  the  emotions  of 
sublimity  and  awe  and  beauty.  They  found 
them  in  the  meeting-house  instead  of  in  a  book ; 
precisely  as,  in  a  later  day,  millions  of  Ameri 
cans  experienced  what  was  for  them  the  emo 
tional  equivalent  of  poetry  in  the  sermons  of 
Henry  Ward  Beecher  and  Phillips  Brooks. 
French  pulpit  oratory  of  the  seventeenth  cent 
ury  wins  recognition  as  a  distinct  type  of  liter 
ature;  its  great  practitioners,  like  Massillon, 
Bourdaloue,  Bossuet,  are  appraised  in  all  the 
histories  of  the  national  literature  and  in  books 
devoted  to  the  evolution  of  literary  species.  In 

[96] 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

the  American  colonies  the  great  preachers  per 
formed  the  functions  of  men  of  letters  without 
knowing  it.  They  have  been  treated  with  too 
scant  respect  in  the  histories  of  American  lit 
erature.  It  is  one  of  the  penalties  of  Protest 
antism  that  the  audiences,  after  a  while,  out 
grow  the  preacher.  The  development  of  the 
historic  sense,  of  criticism,  of  science,  makes  an 
impassable  gulf  between  Jonathan  Edwards 
and  the  American  churches  of  the  twentieth 
century.  A  sense  of  profound  changes  in  theo 
logy  has  left  our  contemporaries  indifferent  to 
the  literature  in  which  the  old  theology  was 
clothed. 

There  is  one  department  of  American  liter 
ary  production,  of  which  Bossuet's  famous  ser 
mon  on  Queen  Henrietta  Maria  of  England 
may  serve  to  remind  us,  which  illustrates  sig 
nificantly  the  national  idealism.  I  mean  the 
commemorative  oration.  The  addresses  upon 
the  Pilgrim  Fathers  by  such  orators  as  Everett, 
Webster,  and  Choate;  the  countless  orations 
before  such  organizations  as  the^ew  England 
Society  of  New  York  and  the  Phi  Beta  Kappa; 
the  papers  read  before  historical  and  patriotic 
societies ;  the  birthday  and  centenary  discourses 

[97] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

upon  national  figures  like  Washington  or  Lin 
coln,  have  all  performed,  and  are  still  perform 
ing,  an  inestimable  service  in  stimulating  popu 
lar  loyalty  to  the  idealism  of  the  fathers.  As 
literature,  most  of  this  production  is  derivative : 
we  listen  to  eloquence  about  the  Puritans,  but 
we  do  not  read  the  Puritans ;  the  description 
of  Arthur  Dimmesdale's  election  sermon  in 
'The  Scarlet  Letter ',  moving  as  it  may  be,  tempts 
no  one  to  open  the  stout  collections  of  election 
sermons  in  the  libraries.  Yet  the  original  liter 
ature  of  mediaeval  chivalry  is  known  only  to 
a  few  scholars :  Tennyson's  Idylls  outsell  the 
Mabinogion  and  Malory.  The  actual  world  of 
literature  is  always  shop-worn ;  a  world  chiefly 
of  second-hand  books,  of  warmed-over  emo 
tions  ;  and  it  is  not  surprising  that  many  listen 
ers  to  orations  about  Lincoln  do  not  personally 
emulate  Lincoln,  and  that  many  of  the  most 
enthusiastic  dealers  in  the  sentiment  of  the  an 
cestral  meeting-house  do  not  themselves  attend 
church. 

The  other  iagredients  of  John  Adams's  ideal 
Commonwealm  are  no  less  significant  of  our 
national  disposition.  Take  the  school-house. 
It  was  planted  in  the  wilderness  for  the  training 

[  98  ] 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

of  boys  and  girls  and  for  a  future  "godly  and 
learned  ministry."  The  record  of  American 
education  is  a  long  story  of  idealism  which  has 
touched  literature  at  every  turn.  The  c<  red 
school-house  "  on  the  hill-top  or  at  the  cross 
roads,  the  "log-colleges"  in  forgotten  hamlets, 
the  universities  founded  by  great  states,  are  all 
a  record  of  the  American  faith  —  which  has 
sometimes  been  called  a  fetich  —  in  education. 
In  its  origin,  it  was  a  part  of  the  essential  pro 
gramme  of  Calvinism  to  make  a  man  able  to 
judge  for  himself  upon  the  most  momentous 
questions ;  a  programme,  too,  of  that  political 
democracy  which  lay  embedded  in  the  tenets 
of  Calvinism,  a  democracy  which  believes  and 
must  continue  to  believe  that  an  educated  elect 
orate  can  safeguard  its  own  interests  and  train 
up  its  own  leaders.  The  poetry  of  the  Ameri 
can  school-house  was  written  long  ago  by  Whit- 
tier,  in  describing  Joshua  Coffin's  school  under 
the  big  elm  on  the  cross-road  in  East  Haver- 
hill  ;  its  humor  and  pathos  and  drama  have  been 
portrayed  by  innumerable  story-writers  and  es 
sayists.  Mrs.  Martha  Baker  Dunn's  charming 
sketches,  entitled  "  Cicero  in  Maine  "  and  "  Vir 
gil  in  Maine,''  indicate  the  idealism  once  taught 

[99] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

in  the  old  rural  academies,  —  and  it  is  taught 
there  still.  City  men  will  stop  wistfully  on  the 
street,  in  the  first  week  of  September,  to  watch 
the  boys  and  girls  go  trudging  off  to  their  first 
day  of  school ;  men  who  believe  in  nothing  else 
at  least  believe  in  that !  And  school  and  college 
and  university  remain,  as  in  the  beginning,  the 
first  garden-ground  and  the  last  refuge  of  liter 
ature. 

That  "town-meeting"  which  John  Adams 
thought  Virginia  might  do  well  to  adopt  has 
likewise  become  a  symbol  of  American  ideal 
ism.  Together  with  the  training-day,  it  repre 
sented  the  rights  and  duties  and  privileges  of 
free  men ;  the  machinery  of  self-government. 
It  was  democracy,  rather  than  "  representative  " 
government,  under  its  purest  aspect.  Sentiments 
of  responsibility  to  the  town,  the  political  unit, 
and  to  the  Commonwealth,  the  group  of  units, 
were  bred  there.  Likewise,  it  was  a  training- 
school  for  sententious  speech  and  weighty 
action ;  its  roots,  as  historians  love  to  demon 
strate,  run  back  very  far ;  and  though  the  modern 
drift  to  cities  has  made  its  machinery  ineffective 
in  the  larger  communities,  it  remains  a  perpet 
ual  spring  or  feeding  stream  to  the  broader  cur- 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

rents  of  our  national  life.  Without  an  under 
standing  of  the  town-meeting  and  its  equiv 
alents,  our  political  literature  loses  much  of  its 
significance.  Like  the  school-house  and  meet 
ing-house,  it  has  become  glorified  by  our  men 
of  letters.  John  Fiske  and  other  historians 
have  celebrated  it  in  some  of  the  most  bril 
liant  pages  of  our  political  writing ;  and  that 
citizen  literature,  so  deeply  characteristic  of  us, 
found  in  the  plain,  forthright,  and  public-spir 
ited  tone  of  town-meeting  discussions  its  key 
note.  The  spectacular  debates  of  our  national 
history,  the  dramatic  contests  in  the  great  arena 
of  the  Senate  Chamber,  the  discussions  before 
huge  popular  audiences  in  the  West,  have  main 
tained  the  civic  point  of  view,  have  developed 
and  dignified  and  enriched  the  prose  style  first 
employed  by  American  freemen  in  deciding 
their  local  affairs  in  the  presence  of  their  neigh 
bors.  "  I  am  a  part  of  this  people,'*  said  Lin 
coln  proudly  in  one  of  his  famous  debates  of 
1858;  "I  was  raised  just  a  little  east  of  here  "; 
and  this  nearness  to  the  audience,  this  directness 
and  simplicity andgenuineness  of  ourbest  polit 
ical  literature,  its  homely  persuasiveness  and 
force,  is  an  inheritance  of  the  town-meeting. 


•THE  AMERICAN  MIND 


Bible  and  meeting-house,  school-house  and 
town-meeting,  thus  illustrate  concretely  the 
responsiveness  of  the  American  character  to 
idealistic  impulses.  They  are  external  symbols 
of  a  certain  state  of  mind.  It  may  indeed  be 
urged  that  they  are  primarily  signs  of  a  moral 
and  social  or  institutional  trend,  and  are  there 
fore  non-literary  evidence  of  American  ideal 
ism.  Nevertheless,  institutional  as  they  may  be 
deemed,  they  lie  close  to  that  poetry  of  daily 
duty  in  which  our  literature  has  not  been  poor. 
They  are  fundamentally  related  to  that  atti 
tude  of  mind,  that  habitual  temper  of  the  spirit, 
which  has  produced,  in  all  countries  of  settled 
use  and  wont,  the  literature  of  idealism.  Bru- 
netiere  said  of  Flaubert's  most  famous  woman 
character  that  poor  Emma  Bovary,  the  prey 
and  the  victim  of  Romantic  desires,  was  after 
all  much  like  the  rest  of  us  except  that  she 
lacked  the  intelligence  to  perceive  the  charm 
and  poetry  of  the  daily  task.  We  have  already 
touched  upon  the  purely  romantic  side  of 
American  energy  and  of  American  imagina 
tion,  and  we  must  shortly  look  more  closely 
still  at  those  impulses  of  daring,  those  moods 
of  heightened  feeling,  that  intensified  individ- 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

ualism,  the  quest  of  strangeness  and  terror  and 
wild  beauty,  which  characterize  our  romantic 
writing.  But  this  romanticism  is,  as  it  were,  a 
segment  of  the  larger  circle  of  idealism.  It  is 
idealism  accentuated  by  certain  factors,  driven 
to  self-expression  by  the  passions  of  scorn  or 
of  desire ;  it  exceeds,  in  one  way  or  another, 
the  normal  range  of  experience  and  emotion. 
Our  romantic  American  literature  is  doubtless 
our  greatest.  And  yet  some  of  the  most  char 
acteristic  tendencies  of  American  writing  are  to 
be  found  in  the  poetry  of  daily  experience,  in 
the  quiet  accustomed  light  that  falls  upon  one's 
own  doorway  and  garden,  in  the  immemorial 
charm  of  going  forth  to  one's  labor  and  return 
ing  in  the  evening,  —  poetry  old  as  the  world. 

Let  us  see  how  this  glow  of  idealism  touches 
some  of  the  more  intimate  aspects  of  human  ex 
perience.  "  Out  of  the  three  Reverences,"  says 
Wilhelm  Meister,  "  springs  the  highest  Re- 
verence,  Reverence  for  Oneself/'  Open  the 
pages  of  Hawthorne.  Moving  wholly  within 
the  framework  of  established  institutions,  with 
no  desire  to  shatter  the  existing  scheme  of 
social  order,  choosing  as  its  heroes  men  of  the 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

meeting-house,  town-meeting,  and  training- 
day,  how  intensely  nevertheless  does  the  imag 
ination  of  this  fiction-writer  illuminate  the  Body 
and  the  Soul! 

Take  first  the  Body.  The  inheritance  of 
English  Puritanism  may  be  traced  throughout 
our  American  writing,  in  its  reverence  for  phys 
ical  purity.  The  result  is  something  unique  in 
literary  history.  Continental  critics,  while  re 
cognizing  the  intellectual  and  artistic  powers 
revealed  in  ¥he  Scarlet  Letter,  have  seldom 
realized  the  awfulness,  to  the  Puritan  mind, 
of  the  very  thought  of  an  adulterous  minister. 
That  a  priest  in  southern  Europe  should  break 
his  vows  is  indeed  scandalous ;  but  the  sin  is  re 
garded  as  a  failure  of  the  natural  man  to  keep 
a  vow  requiring  supernatural  grace  for  its  ful 
filment;  it  may  be  that  the  priest  had  no  voca 
tion  for  his  sacred  office ;  he  is  unfrocked,  pun 
ished,  forgotten,  yet  a  certain  mantle  of  human 
charity  still  covers  his  offence.  But  in  the  Pur 
itan  scheme  (and  'The  Scarlet  Letter,  save  for 
that  one  treacherous,  warm  human  moment  in 
the  woodland  where  "all  was  spoken/'  lies 
wholly  within  the  set  framework  of  Puritan 
ism)  there* is  no  forgiveness  for  a  sin  of  the 

[  I04  ] 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

flesh.  There  is  only  Law,  Law  stretching  on 
into  infinitude  until  the  mind  shudders  at  it. 
Hawthorne  knew  his  Protestant  New  England 
through  and  through.  The  Scarlet  Letter  is  the 
most  striking  example  in  our  national  literature 
of  that  idealization  of  physical  purity,  but  hun 
dreds  of  other  romances  and  poems,  less  mor 
bid  if  less  great,  assert  in  unmistakable  terms 
the  same  moral  conviction,  the  same  ideal. 

Yet,  in  spite  of  its  theme,  there  was  never  a 
less  adulterous  novel  than  this  book  which  plays 
so  artistically  with  the  letter  A.  The  body  is 
branded,  is  consumed,  is  at  last,  perhaps,  trans 
figured  by  the  intense  rays  of  light  emitted  from 
the  suffering  soul. 

"  The  soul  is  form  and  doth  the  body  make." 

In  this  intense  preoccupation  with  the  Soul, 
Hawthorne's  romance  is  in  unison  with  the 
more  mystical  and  spiritual  utterances  of  Cath 
olicism  as  well  as  of  Protestantism.  It  was  in 
part  a  resultant  of  that  early  American  isola 
tion  which  contributed  so  effectively  to  the  art 
istic  setting  of  The  Scarlet  Letter.  But  in  his 
doctrine  of  spiritual  integrity,  in  the  agonized 
utterance,  "Be  true  —  be  true  !"  as  well  as  in 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

his  reverence  for  purity  of  the  body,  our  great 
est  romancer  was  typical  of  the  imaginative  lit 
erature  of  his  countrymen.  The  restless  artistic 
experiments  of  Poe  presented  the  human  body 
in  many  a  ghastly  and  terrifying  aspect  of  ill 
ness  and  decay,  and  distorted  by  all  passions 
save  one.  His  imagination  was  singularly  sex 
less.  Pathological  students  have  pointed  out 
the  relation  between  this  characteristic  of  Poe's 
writing,  and  his  known  tendencies  toward  opi 
um-eating,  alcoholism,  and  tuberculosis.  But 
no  such  explanation  is  at  hand  to  elucidate  the 
absence  of  sexual  passion  from  the  novels  of 
the  masculine-minded  Fenimore  Cooper.  One 
may  say,  indeed,  that  Cooper's  novels,  like 
Scott's,  lack  intensity  of  spiritual  vision ;  that 
their  tone  is  consonant  with  the  views  of  a  sound 
Church  of  England  parson  in  the  eighteenth 
century;  and  that  the  absence  of  physical  pas 
sion,  like  the  absence  of  purely  spiritual  insight, 
betrays  a  certain  defect  in  Cooper's  imaginative 
grasp  and  depth.  But  it  is  better  criticism,  after 
all,  to  remember  that  these  three  pioneers  in 
American  fiction-writing  were  composing  for 
an  audience  in  which  Puritan  traditions  or  tastes 
were  predominant.  Not  one  of  the  three  men 
[  106] 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

but  would  have  instantly  sacrificed  an  artistic 
effect,  legitimate  in  the  eyes  of  Fielding  or 
Goethe  or  Balzac,  rather  than  —  in  the  phrase 
so  often  satirized  —  "  bring  a  blush  to  the  cheek 
of  innocence."  In  other  words,  the  presence 
of  a  specific  audience,  accustomed  to  certain 
Anglo-Saxon  and  Puritanic  restraint  of  topic 
and  of  speech,  has  from  the  beginning  of  our 
imaginative  literature  cooperated  with  the  in 
stinct  of  our  writers.  That  Victorian  reticence 
which  is  so  plainly  seen  even  in  such  full-bodied 
writers  as  Dickens  or  Thackeray  —  a  reticence 
which  men  like  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  and  Mr. 
Galsworthy  and  Mr.  Wells  think  so  hypocrit 
ical  and  dangerous  to  society  and  which  they 
have  certainly  done  their  utmost  to  abolish  — 
has  hitherto  dominated  our  American  writing. 
The  contemporary  influence  of  great  Conti 
nental  writers  to  whom  reticence  is  unknown, 
combined  with  the  influence  of  a  contemporary 
opera  and  drama  to  which  reticence  would  be 
unprofitable,  are  now  assaulting  this  dominant 
convention.  Very  possibly  it  is  doomed.  But 
it  is  only  within  recent  years  that  its  rule  has 
been  questioned. 

One  result  of  it  may,  I  think,  be  fairly  ad- 

[  ,'07  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

mitted.  While  very  few  writers  of  eminence, 
after  all,  in  any  country,  wish  to  bring  a  "  blush 
to  the  cheek  of  innocence,"  they  naturally  wish, 
as  Thackeray  put  it  in  one  of  the  best-known 
of  his  utterances,  to  be  permitted  to  depict  a 
man  to  the  utmost  of  their  power.  American 
literary  conventions,  like  English  conventions, 
have  now  and  again  laid  a  restraining  and  com 
pelling  hand  upon  the  legitimate  exercise  of  this 
artistic  instinct ;  and  this  fact  has  cooperated 
with  many  social,  ethical,  and  perhaps  physio 
logical  causes  to  produce  a  thinness  or  blood- 
lessness  in  our  books.  They  are  graceful,  pleas 
ing,  but  pale,  like  one  of  those  cool  whitish 
uncertain  skies  of  an  American  spring.  They 
lack  "  body,"  like  certain  wines.  It  is  not  often 
that  we  can  produce  a  real  Burgundy.  We  have 
hadmany  distinguished  fiction-writers,  but  none 
with  the  physical  gusto  of  a  Fielding,  a  Smol 
lett,  or  even  a  Dickens,  who,  idealist  and  ro 
manticist  as  he  was,  and  Victorian  as  were  his 
artistic  preferences,  has  this  animal  life  which 
tingles  upon  every  page.  We  must  confess  that 
there  is  a  certain  quality  of  American  idealism 
which  is  covertly  suspicious  or  openly  hostile  to 
the  glories  of  bodily  sensation.  Emerson's  thin 
[  108  ] 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

high  shoulders  peep  up  reproachfully  above  the 
desk ;  Lanier  is  playing  his  reproachful  flute ; 
Longfellow  reads  Fremont's  Rocky  Mountain 
experiences  whilelyingabed,andsighs  " But, ah, 
the  discomforts!";  living's  Astoria,  superb  as 
were  the  possibilities  of  its  physical  background, 
tastes  like  parlor  exploration.  Even  Dana's 
Before  the  Mast  and  Parkman's  Oregon  T^rail^ 
transcripts  of  robust  actual  experience,  and  ad 
mirable  books,  reveal  a  sort  of  physical  paleness 
compared  with  TurgenierFs  Notes  of  a  Sports 
man  and  Tolstoi's  Sketches  of  Sebastopol  and 
the  Crimea.  They  are  Harvard  undergraduate 
writing,  after  all! 

These  facts  illustrate  anew  that  standing 
temptation  of  the  critic  of  American  literature  to 
palliate  literary  shortcomings  by  the  plea  that  we 
possess  certain  admirable  non-literary  qualities. 
The  dominant  idealism  of  the  nation  has  levied, 
or  seemed  to  levy,  a  certain  tax  upon  our  writ 
ing.  Some  instincts,  natural  to  the  full-blooded 
utterance  of  Continental  literature,  have  been 
starved  or  eliminated  here.  Very  well.  The  char 
acteristic  American  retort  to  this  assertion  would 
be:  Better  our  long  record  and  habit  of  ideal 
ism  than  a  few  masterpieces  more  or  less.  As  a 

[  I09  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

people,  we  have  cheerfully  accepted  the  Puritan 
restraintof  speech,  we  have  respected  the  shame 
faced  conventions  of  decentand  social  utterance. 
Like  the  men  and  women  described  in  Locker- 
Lampson's  verses,  Americans 

"  eat,  and  drink,  and  scheme,  and  plod, — 
They  go  to  church  on  Sunday; 
And  many  are  afraid  of  God — 
And  more  of  Mrs.  Grundy." 

NowMrs.Grundy  is  assuredly  not  the  most  de 
sirable  of  literary  divinities,  but  the  student  of 
classical  literature  can  easily  think  of  other  di 
vinities,  celebrated  in  exquisite  Greek  and  Ro 
man  verse,  who  are  distinctly  less  desirable  still. 
"  Not  passion,  but  sentiment/'  said  Haw 
thorne,  in  a  familiar  passage  of  criticism  of 
his  own  Twice-Told  Tales.  H ow  often  must  the 
student  of  American  literature  echo  that  half- 
melancholy  but  just  verdict,  as  he  surveys  the 
transition  from  the  spiritual  intensity  of  a  fewof 
our  earlier  writers  to  the  sentimental  qualities 
which  have  brought  popular  recognition  to  the 
many.  Take  the  word  "soul"  itself.  Calvinism 
shadowed  and  darkened  the  meaning,  perhaps, 
and  yet  its  spiritual  passion  made  the  word 
"soul  "  sublime.  The  reaction  against  Calvin- 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

ism  has  made  religion  more  human,  natural, 
and  possibly  more  Christlike,  but  "soul"  has 
lost  the  thrilling  solemnity  with  which  Edwards 
pronounced  the  word.  Emerson  and  Haw 
thorne,  far  as  they  had  escaped  from  the  bonds 
of  their  ancestral  religion,  still  utter  the  word 
"soul  "with  awe.  But  in  the  popular  ser 
mon  and  hymn  and  story  of  our  day,  —  with 
their  search  after  the  sympathetic  and  the  senti 
mental,  after  what  is  called  in  magazine  slang 
"heart-interest," —  the  word  has  lost  both  its 
intellectual  distinction  and  its  literary  magic. 
It  will  regain  neither  until  it  is  pronounced 
once  more  with  spiritual  passion. 

But  in  literature,  as  in  other  things,  we  must  »  > 
take  what  we  can  get.  The  great  mass  of  our 
American  writing  is  sentimental,  because  it  has  ..: 
been  produced  by,  and  for,  an  excessively  senti 
mental  people.  The  poems  in  Stedman's  care 
fully  chosen  Anthology^  the  prose  and  verse 
in  the  two  volume  Stedman-Hutchinson  col 
lection  of  American  Literature,  the  Library  of 
Southern  Literature,  and  similar  sectional  an 
thologies,  the  school  Readers  and  Speakers, 
-particularly  in  the  half-century  between 
1830  and  1880, — our  newspapers  and  maga- 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

zines,  —  particularly  the  so-called  "yellow" 
newspapers  and  the  illustrated  magazines  typi 
fied  by  Harper  s  Monthly, — are  all  fairly  drip 
ping  with  sentiment.  American  oratory  is  noto 
riously  the  most  sentimental  oratory  of  the 
civilized  world.  The  Congressional  Record  still 
presents  such  specimens  of  sentiment  —  de 
livered  or  given  leave  to  be  printed,  it  is  true, 
for  "home  consumption  "  rather  than  to  affect 
the  course  of  legislation  —  as  are  inexplicable  to 
an  Englishman  or  a  Frenchman  or  an  Italian. 
Immigrants  as  we  all  are,  and  migratory  as 
we  have  ever  been,  —  so  much  so  that  one 
rarely  meets  an  American  who  was  born  in 
the  house  built  by  his  grandfather,  —  we  cling 
with  peculiar  fondness  to  the  sentiment  of 
"Home."  The  best-known  American  poem, 
for  decades,  was  Samuel  Woodworth's  "  Old 
Oaken  Bucket,"  the  favorite  popular  song  was 
Stephen  Foster's  "  My  Old  Kentucky  Home," 
the  favorite  play  was  Denman  Thompson's 
"Old  Homestead."  Without  that  appealing 
word  "mother  "the  American  melodrama  would 
be  robbed  of  its  fifth  act.  Without  pictures  of 
"  the  child  "  the  illustrated  magazines  would  go 
into  bankruptcy.  No  country  has  witnessed 

C  »»] 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

such  a  production  of  periodicals  and  books  for 
boys  and  girls :  France  and  Germany  imitate 
in  vain  'The  Toutb's  Companion  and  St.  Nicholas, 
as  they  did  the  stories  of  "Oliver  Optic''  and 
Little  Women  and  Little  Lord  Fauntleroy. 

The  sentimental  attitude  towards  women  and 
children,  which  is  one  of  the  most  typical  as 
pects  of  American  idealism,  is  constantly  illus 
trated  in  our  short  stories.  Bret  Harte,  disci 
ple  of  Dickens  as  he  was,  and  Romantic  as  was 
his  fashion  of  dressing  up  his  miners  and  gam 
blers,  was  accurately  faithful  to  the  American 
feeling  towards  the  "kid"  and  the  "woman." 
"Tennessee's  Partner,"  " The  Luck  of  Roar 
ing  Camp,"  "  Christmas  at  Sandy  Bar,"  are  ob 
vious  examples.  Owen  Wister's  stories  are 
equally  faithful  and  admirable  in  this  matter. 
The  American  girl  still  does  astonishing  things 
in  international  novels,  as  she  has  continued 
to  do  since  the  eighteen-sixties,  but  they  are 
astonishing  mainly  to  the  European  eye  and 
against  the  conventionalized  European  back 
ground.  She  does  the  same  things  at  home, 
and  neither  she  nor  her  mother  sees  why  she 
should  not,  so  universal  among  us  is  the  chiv 
alrous  interpretation  of  actions  and  situations 

[  "3  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

which  amaze  the  European  observer.  The  pop 
ular  American  literature  which  recognizes  and 
encourages  this  position  of  the  "  young  girl " 
in  our  social  structure  is  a  literature  primarily 
of  sentiment.  The  note  of  passion  —  in  the  Eu 
ropean  sense  of  that  word — jars  and  shatters 
it.  The  imported  "problem-play,""  written  for 
an  adult  public  in  Paris  or  London,  introduces 
social  facts  and  intellectual  elements  almost 
wholly  alien  to  the  experience  of  American 
matinee  audiences.  Disillusioned  historians  of 
our  literature  have  instanced  this  unsophistica- 
tion  as  a  proof  of  our  national  inexperience ; 
yet  it  is  often  a  sort  of  radiant  and  triumphant 
unsophistication  which  does  not  lose  its  inno 
cence  in  parting  with  its  ignorance. 

That  sentimental  idealization  of  classes, 
whether  peasant,  bourgeois,  or  aristocratic, 
which  has  long  been  a  feature  of  Continental 
and  English  poetry  and  fiction,  is  practically 
absent  from  American  literature.  Whatever  the 
future  may  bring,  there  have  hitherto  been  no 
fixed  classes  in  American  society.  Webster  was 
guilty  of  no  exaggeration  when  he  declared  that 
the  whole  North  was  made  up  of  laborers, 
and  Lincoln  spoke  in  the  same  terms  in  his 

[  "4] 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

well-known  sentences  about "  hired  laborers  " : 
"  twenty-five  years  ago  I  was  a  hired  laborer." 
The  relative  uniformity  of  economic  and  social 
conditions,  which  prevailed  until  toward  the 
close  of  the  nineteenth  century,  made,  no 
doubt,  for  the  happiness  of  the  greatest  num 
ber,  but  it  failed,  naturally,  to  afford  that  pic- 
turesqueness  of  class  contrast  and  to  stimulate 
that  sentiment  of  class  distinction,  in  which 
European  literature  is  so  rich. 

Very  interesting,  in  the  light  of  contempo 
rary  economic  conditions,  is  the  effort  made  by 
American  poets  in  the  middle  of  the  last  cent 
ury  to  glorify  labor.  They  were  not^o  much 
idealizing  a  particular  laboring  class,  as  en-  , 
deavoring,  in  Whitman's  words,  "  To  teach  the 
average  man  the  glory  of  his  walk  and  trade." 
Whitman  himself  sketched  the  American  work 
man  in  almost  every  attitude  which  appealed 
to  his  own  sense  of  the  picturesque  and  heroic. 
But  years  before  Leaves  of  Grass  was  published, 
Whittier  had  celebrated  in  his  Songs  of  Labor  _• 
the  glorified  images  of  lumberman  and  drover, 
shoemaker  and  fisherman.  Lucy  Larcom  and 
the  authors  of  'The  Lowell  Offering  portrayed 
the  fine  idealism  of  the  young  women  —  of  the 

[  »5  1 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

best  American  stock  —  who  went  enthusiastic 
ally  to  work  in  the  cotton-mills  of  Lowell  and 
Lawrence,  or  who  bound  shoes  by  their  own 
firesides  on  the  Essex  County  farms.  That  glow 
of  enthusiasm  for  labor  was  chiefly  moral,  but 
it  was  poetical  as  well.  The  changes  which  have 
come  over  the  economic  and  social  life  of  Amer 
ica  are  nowhere  more  sharply  indicated  than  in 
that  very  valley  of  the  Merrimac  where,  sixty 
and  seventy  years  ago,  one  could  "  hear  Amer 
ica  singing."  There  are  few  who  are  singing  to 
day  in  the  cotton-mills;  the  operators,  instead 
of  girls  from  the  hill-farms,  are  Greeks,  Lithu 
anians,  Armenians,  Italians.  Whittier's  drovers 
have  gone  forever;  the  lumbermen  and  deep- 
sea  fishermen  have  grown  fewer,  and  the  men 
who  still  swing  the  axes  and  haul  the  frozen 
cod-lines  are  mostly  aliens.  The  pride  that  once 
broke  into  singing  has  turned  harsh  and  silent. 
"  Labor"  looms  vast  upon  the  future  political 
and  social  horizon,  but  the  songs  of  labor  have 
lost  the  lyric  note.  They  have  turned  into  the 
dramas  and  tragedies  of  labor,  as  portrayed 
with  the  swift  and  fierce  insistence  of  the  short 
story,  illustrated  by  the  Kodak.  In  the  great 
agricultural  sections  of  the  West  and  South  the 

[  "6] 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

old  bucolic  sentiment  still  survives, — that  sim 
ple  joy  of  seeing  the  "  frost  upon  the  pumpkin  " 
and  "  the  fodder  in  the  stock  "  which  Mr.  James  ; 
Whitcomb  Riley  has  sung  with  such  charming 
fidelity  to  the  type.  But  even  on  the  Western 
farms  toil  has  grown  less  manual.  It  is  more  a 
matter  of  expert  handling  of  machinery.  Reap 
ing  and  binding  may  still  have  their  poet,  but 
he  needs  to  be  a  Kipling  rather  than  a  Burns. 

Our  literature,  then,  reveals  few  traces  of 
idealization  of  a  class,  and  but  little  idealization 
of  trades  or  callings.  Neither  class  nor  calling 
presents  anything  permanent  to  the  American 
imagination,  or  stands  for  anything  ultimate  in 
American  experience.  On  the  other  hand,  our  j. 
writing  is  rich  in  local  sentiment  and  sectional 
loyalty.  The  short  story,  which  has  seized  so 
greedily  the  more  dramatic  aspects  of  Amer 
ican  energy,  has  been  equally  true  to  the  quiet 
background  of  rural  scenery  and  familiar  ways. 
American  idealism,  as  shown  in  the  transform 
ation  of  the  lesser  loyalties  of  home  and  coun 
tryside  into  the  larger  loyalties  of  state  and 
section,  and  the  absorption  of  these,  in  turn, 
into  the  emotions  of  nationalism,  is  particularly 
illustrated  in  our  political  verse.  A  striking 

[  117] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

example  of  the  imaginative  visualization  of  the 
political  units  of  a  state  is  the  spirited  roll-call 
of  the  counties  in  Whittier's  "  Massachusetts 
to  Virginia/'  But  the  burden  of  that  fine  poem, 
after  all,  is  the  essential  unity  of  Massachusetts 
as  a  sovereign  state,  girding  herself  to  repel  the 
attack  of  another  sovereign  state,  Virginia.  Now 
the  evolution  of  our  political  history,  both  lo 
cal  and  national,  has  tended  steadily,  for  half  a 
century,  to  the  obliteration,  for  purposes  of  the 
imagination,  of  county  lines  within  state  lines. 
At  the  last  Republican  state  convention  held 
in  Massachusetts,  there  were  no  county  banners 
displayed,  for  the  first  time  in  half  a  century. 
Many  a  city-dweller  to-day  cannot  tell  in  what 
county  he  is  living  unless  he  has  happened  to 
make  a  transfer  of  real  estate.  State  lines  them 
selves  are  fading  away.  The  federal  idea  has 
triumphed.  Doubtless  the  majority  of  the  fel 
low  citizens  of  John  Randolph  of  Roanoke  were 
all  the  more  proud  of  him  because  the  poet 
could  say  of  him,  in  writing  an  admiring  and 
mournful  epitaph:  — 

"  Beyond  Virginia's  border  line 
His  patriotism  perished." 

The  great  collections  of  Civil  War  verse,  which 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

are  lying  almost  unread  in  the  libraries,  are  store 
houses  of  this  ancient  state  pride  and  jealousy, 
which  was  absorbed  so  fatally  into  the  larger 
sectional  antagonism.  "  Maryland,  my  Mary 
land"  gave  place  to  "  Dixie,"  just  as  Whittier's 
"Massachusetts  to  Virginia"  was  forgotten 
when  marching  men  began  to  sing  "John 
Brown's  Body  "  and  "  The  Battle  Hymn  of  the 
Republic."  The  literature  of  sectionalism  still 
lingers  in  its  more  lovable  aspect  in  the  verse 
and  fiction  which  still  celebrates  the  fairer  side 
of  the  civilization  of  the  Old  South :  its  ideals 
of  chivalry  and  local  loyalty,  its  gracious  women 
and  gallant  men.  Our  literature  needs  to  cul 
tivate  this  provincial  affection  for  the  past,  as  an 
offset  to  the  barren  uniformity  which  the  fed 
eral  scheme  allows.  But  the  ultimate  imagina 
tive  victory,  like  the  actual  political  victory  of 
the  Civil  War,  is  with  the  thought  and  feeling 
of  Nationalism.  It  is  foreshadowed  in  that  pas 
sionate  lyric  cry  of  Lowell,  which  sums  up  so 
much  and,  like  all  true  passion,  anticipates  so 
much  :  — 

"  O  Beautiful!  my  Country !" 
The  literary  record  of  American  idealism 
thus  illustrates  how  deeply  the  conception  of 

C  "9] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

Nationalism  has  affected  the  imagination  of 
our  countrymen.  ^The  literary  record  of,the 
American  conception  of  liberty  runs  &UliLT 
back.  Some  historians  have  allowed  them 
selves  to  think  that  the  American  notion  of 
liberty  is  essentially  declamatory,  a  sort  of  fu 
tile  echo  of  Patrick  Henry's  "  Give  me  Liberty 
or  give  me  Death";  and  not  only  declamatory, 
but  hopelessly  theoretical  and  abstract/They 
grant  that  it  was  a  trumpet-note,  no  doubt,  for 
agitators  against  the  Stamp  Act,  and  for  pam 
phleteers  like  Thomas  Paine;  that  it  may  have 
been  a  torch  for  lighting  dark  and  weary  ways 
in  the  Revolutionary  War;  but  they  believe  it 
likewise  to  be  a  torch  which  gleams  with  the 
fire  caught  from  France  and  which  was  passed 
back  to  France  in  turn  when  her  own  great 
bonfire  was  ready  for  lighting.  The  facts,  how 
ever,  are  inconsistent  with  this  picturesque 
theory  of  contemporary  reactionists.  It  is  true 
that  the  word  "liberty"  has  been  full  of  tempt 
ation  for  generations  of  American  orators,  that 
it  has  become  an  idol  of  the  forum,  and  often 
a  source  of  heat  rather  than  of  light.  But  to 
treat  American  Liberty  as  if  she  habitually  wore 
the  red  cap  is  to  nourish  a  Francophobia  as 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

absurd  as  Edmund  Burke's.nThe  sober  truth 
is  that  the  American  working  theory  of  Lib 
erty  is  singularly  like  St.  Paul's.  "  Ye  have  been 
called  unto  liberty;  only  use  not  liberty  for  an 
occasion  to  the  flesh."  A  few  sentences  from 
John  Winthrop,  written  in  1645,  are  signifi 
cant:  "There  is  a  twofold  liberty,  natural  .  .  . 
and  civil  or  federal.  The  first  is  common  to 
man  with  beasts  and  other  creatures.  By  this, 
man,  as  he  stands  in  relation  to  man  simply, 
hath  liberty  to  do  what  he  lists;  it  is  a  liberty 
to  evil  as  well  as  to  good.  This  liberty  is  incom 
patible  and  inconsistent  with  authority.  .  .  . 
The  other  kind  of  liberty  I  call  civil  or  federal, 
it  may  also  be  termed  moral.  .  .  .  This  liberty 
is  the  proper  end  and  object  of  authority,  and 
cannot  subsist  without  it;  and  it  is  a  liberty  to 
that  only  which  is  good,  just,  and  honest.  This 
liberty  you  are  to  stand  for,  with  the  hazard 
(not  only  of  your  goods,  but)  of  your  lives,  if 
need  be.  .  .  .  This  liberty  is  maintained  and 
exercised  in  a  way  of  subjection  to  authority; 
it  is  of  the  same  kind  of  liberty  wherewith 
Christ  hath  made  us  free." 

There  speaks  the  governor,  the  man  of  affairs, 
the  typical  citizen  of  the  future  republic.  The 

C 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

liberty  to  do  as  one  pleases  is  a  dream  of  the 
Renaissance;  but  out  of  dreamland  it  does  not 
work.  Nobody,  even  in  revolutionary  France, 
imagines  that  it  will  work.  Jefferson,  who  is  pop 
ularly  supposed  to  derive  his  notion  of  liberty 
from  French  theorists,  is  to  all  practical  pur 
poses  nearer  to  John  Winthrop  than  he  is  to 
Rousseau.  The  splendid  phrases  of  his  "  Decla 
ration  "  are  sometimes  characterized  as  abstrac 
tions.  They  are  really  generalizations  from  past 
political  experience.  An  arbitrary  king,  assum 
ing  a  liberty  to  do  as  he  liked,  had  encroached 
upon  the  long-standing  customs  and  authority 
of  the  colonists.  Jefferson,  at  the  bidding  of  the 
Continental  Congress,  served  notice  of  the  royal 
trespass,  and  incidentally  produced  (as  Lincoln 
said)  a  "standard  maxim  for  free  society." 

It  is  true,  no  doubt,  that  the  word  "liberty  " 
became  in  Jefferson's  day,  and  later,  a  mere  par 
tisan  or  national  shibboleth,  standing  for  no 
reality,  degraded  to  a  catchword,  a  symbol  of 
antagonism  to  Great  Britain.  In  the  political 
debates  and  the  impressive  prose  and  verse  of 
the  anti-slavery  struggle,  the  word  became  once 
more  charged  with  vital  meaning;  it  glowed 
under  the  heat  and  pressure  of  an  idea.  Towards 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century  it  went  temp 
orarily  out  of  fashion.  The  late  Colonel  Hig- 
ginson,  an  ideal  type  of  what  Europeans  call  an 
"  1848  "  man,  attended  at  the  close  of  the  cen 
tury  some  sessions  of  the  American  Historical 
Association.  In  his  own  address,  at  the  closing 
dinner,  he  remarked  that  there  was  one  word  for 
which  he  had  listened  in  vain  during  the  read 
ing  of  the  papers  by  the  younger  men.  It  was 
the  word  "liberty."  One  of  the  younger  school 
retorted  promptly  that  since  we  had  the  thing 
liberty,  we  had  no  need  to  glorify  the  word. 
But  Colonel  Higginson,  stanch  adherent  as  he 
was  of  the  "  good  old  cause,"  was  not  convinced. 
Like  many  another  lover  of  American  letters, 
he  thought  that  William  Vaughn  Moody's  ^ 
"  Ode  in  Time  of  Hesitation  "  deserved  a  place 
by  the  side  of  Lowell's  c<  Commemoration 
Ode,"  and  that  when  the  ultimate  day  of  reck 
oning  comes  for  the  whole  muddled  Imperial 
istic  business,  the  standard  of  reckoning  must 
be  "liberty"  as  Winthrop  and  Jefferson  and 
Lincoln  and  Lowell  and  Vaughn  Moody  un 
derstood  the  word. 

In  the  mean  time  we  must  confess  that  the 
history  of  our  literature,  with  a  few  noble  excep- 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

tions,  shows  a  surprising  defect  in  the  passion  for 
freedom.  Tennyson^  famous  lines  about  "Free 
dom  broadening  slowly  down  from  precedent 
to  precedent "  are  perfectly  American  in  their 
conservative  tone ;  while  it  is  Englishmen  like 
Byron  and  Landor  and  Shelley  and  Swinburne 
who  have  written  the  most  magnificent  repub 
lican  poetry.  The  "land  of  the  free"  turns  to 
the  monarchic  mother  country,  after  all,  for  the 
glow  and  thunder  and  splendor  of  the  poetry 
of  freedom.  It  is  one  of  the  most  curious  phe 
nomena  in  the  history  of  literature.  Shall  we 
enter  the  preoccupation  plea  once  more  ?  En 
joying  the  thing  liberty,  have  we  been  therefore 
less  concerned  with  the  idea  ?  Or  is  it  simply 
another  illustration  of  the  defective  passion  of 
American  literature  ? 

Yet  there  is  one  phase  of  political  loyalty 
which  has  been  cherished  by  the  imagination  of 
Americans,  and  which  has  inspired  noteworthy 
oratory  and  noble  political  prose.  It  is  the  sent 
iment  of  Union.  In  one  sense,  of  course,  this 
dates  back  to  the  period  of  Franklin's  bon  mot 
about  our  all  hanging  together,  or  hanging  sep 
arately.  It  is  found  in  Hamilton's  pamphlets, 
in  Paine's  Crisis,  in  the  Federalist,  in  Washing- 

[  "4  ] 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

ton's  "  Farewell  Address."  It  is  peculiarly  as 
sociated  with  the  name  and  fame  of  Daniel  Web 
ster,  and,  to  a  less  degree,  with  the  career  of 
Henry  Clay.  In  the  stress  of  the  debate  over 
slavery,  many  a  Northerner  with  abolitionist 
convictions,  like  the  majority  of  Southerners 
with  slave-holding  convictions,  forgot  the  splen 
did  peroration  of  Webster's  "  Reply  to  Hay  ne  " 
and  were  willing  to  "let  the  Union  go."  But 
in  the  four  tragic  and  heroic  years  that  followed 
the  firing  upon  the  American  flag  at  Fort  Sum- 
ter  the  sentiment  of  Union  was  made  sacred  by 
such  sacrifices  as  the  patriotic  imagination  of 
a  Clay  or  a  Webster  had  never  dreamed.  A  new 
literature  resulted.  A  lofty  ideal  of  indisso 
luble  Union  was  preached  in  pulpits,  pleaded 
for  in  editorials,  sung  in  lyrics,  and  woven 
into  the  web  of  fiction.  Edward  Everett  H  ale's 
Man  Without  a  Country  became  one  of  the 
most  poignantly  moving  of  American  stories. 
In  Walt  Whitman's  Drum-Taps  and  his  later  +. 
poems,  the  "  Union  of  these  States  "  became 
transfigured  with  mystical  significance:  no  long 
er  a  mere  political  compact,  dissoluble  at  will, 
but  a  spiritual  entity,  a  new  incarnation  of  the 
soul  of  man. 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

We  must  deal  later  with  that  American  in 
stinct  of  fellowship  which  Whitman  believed  to 
have  been  finally  cemented  by  the  Civil  War, 
and  which  has  such  import  for  the  future  of  our 
democracy.  There  are  likewise  communal  loy 
alties,  glowing  with  the  new  idealism  which  has 
come  with  the  twentieth  century:  ethical,  mun 
icipal,  industrial,  and  artistic  movements  which 
are  fullofpromise  forthe  higher  lifeof  the  coun 
try,  but  which  have  not  yet  had  time  to  express 
themselves  adequately  in  literature.  There  are 
stirrings  of  racial  loyalty  among  this  and  that 
element  of  our  composite  population,  —  as  for 
instance  among  the  gifted  younger  generation 
of  American  Jews,  —  a  racial  loyalty  not  an 
tagonistic  to  the  American  current  of  ideas,  but 
rather  in  full  unison  with  it.  Internationalism 
itself  furnishes  motives  for  the  activity  of  the 
noblest  imaginations,  and  the  true  literature  of 
internationalism  has  hardly  yet  begun.  It  is  in 
the  play  and  counterplay  of  these  new  forces 
that  the  American  literature  of  the  twentieth 
century  must  measure  itself.  Communal  feel 
ings  novel  to  Americans  bred  under  the  ac 
cepted  individualism  will  doubtless  assert  them 
selves  in  our  prose  and  verse.  But  it  is  to  be 

[  1*6] 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

remembered  that  the  best  writing  thus  far  pro 
duced  on  American  soil  has  been  a  result  of  the 
old  conditions :  of  the  old  "  Reverences  " ;  of  the 
pioneer  training  of  mind  and  body;  of  the  slow 
tempering  of  the  American  spirit  into  an  obstin 
ate  idealism.  We  do  not  know  what  course  the 
ship  may  take  in  the  future,  but 

"  We  know  what  Master  laid  thy  keel, 
What  Workman  wrought  thy  ribs  of  steel, 
Who  made  each  mast  and  sail  and  rope, 
What  anvil  rang,  what  hammers  beat, 
In  what  a  forge  and  what  a  heat 
Were  shaped  the  anchors  of  thy  hope! " 


IV 
Romance  and  Reaction 

THE  characteristic  attitude  of  the  American 
mind,  as  we  have  seen,  is  one  of  idealism.  We 
may  now  venture  to  draw  a  smaller  circle  with 
in  that  larger  circle  of  idealistic  impulses,  and 
to  label  the  smaller  circle  "romance."  Here, 
too,  as  with  the  word  "idealism,"  although  we 
are  to  make  abundant  useof  literary  illustrations 
of  national  tendencies,  we  have  no  need  of  a  se 
verely  technical  definition  of  terms.  When  we 
say,  "  Tom  is  an  idealist "  and  "  Lorenzo  is  a 
romantic  fellow,"  we  convey  at  least  one  toler 
ably  clear  distinction  between  Tom  and  Lo 
renzo.  The  idealist  has  a  certain  characteristic 
habit  of  mind  or  inclination  of  spirit.  When 
confronted  by  experience,  he  reacts  in  a  certain 
way.  In  his  individual  and  social  impulses,  in 
the  travail  of  his  soul,  or  in  his  commerce  with 
his  neighbors  and  the  world,  he  behaves  in  a 
more  or  less  well-defined  fashion.  The  roman- 
[  118  ] 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

ticist,  when  confronted  by  the  same  objects  and 
experiences,  exhibits  another  type  of  behavior. 
Lorenzo,  though  he  be  Tom's  brother,  is  a 
different  fellow;  he  is — in  the  opinion  of  his 
friends,  at  least — a  rather  more  peculiar  person, 
a  creature  of  more  varying  moods,  of  height 
ened  feelings,  of  stranger  ways.  Like  Tom,  he 
is  a  person  of  sentiment,  but  his  sentiment  at 
taches  itself,  not  so  much  to  everyday  aspects 
of  experience,  as  to  that  which  is  unusual  or  ter 
rifying,  lovely  or  far  away;  he  possesses,  or  would 
like  to  possess,  bodily  or  spiritual  daring.  He 
has  the  adventurous  heart.  He  is  of  those  who 
love  to  go  down  to  the  sea  in  ships  and  do  busi 
ness  in  great  waters.  Lorenzo  the  romanticist 
is  made  of  no  finer  clay  than  Tom  the  idealist, 
but  his  nerves  are  differently  tuned.  Your  deep- 
sea  fisherman, after  all,  is  only  a  fisherman  at  bot 
tom.  That  is  to  say,  he  too  is  an  idealist,  but 
he  wants  to  catch  different  species  of  fish  from 
those  which  drop  into  the  basket  of  the  lands 
man.  Precisely  what  he  covets,  perhaps  he  does 
not  know.  I  was  once  foolish  enough  to  ask  an 
old  Alsatian  soldier  who  was  patiently  holding 
his  rod  over  a  most  unpromising  canal  near 
Strassburg,  what  kind  offish  he  was  fishing  for. 

[  I29  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

kinds,"  was  his  rebuking  answer,  and  I 
took  off  my  hat  to  the  veteran  romanticist. 

The  words  "  romance  "  and  "  romanticism  " 
I  have  been  repeated  to  the  ears  of  our  genera 
tion  with  wearisome  iteration.  Not  the  least  of 
the  good  luck  of  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  lay 
in  the  fact  that  they  scarcely  knew  that  they 
were  "romanticists."  Middle-aged  readers  of 
the  present  day  may  congratulate  themselves 
that  in  their  youth  they  read  Wordsworth  and 
Coleridge  simply  because  it  was  Wordsworth 
and  Coleridge  and  not  documents  illustrating 
the  history  of  the  romantic  movement.  But  the 
rising  generation  is  sophisticated.  For  better  or 
worse  it  has  been  taught  to  distinguish  between 
the  word  "  romance  "  on  the  one  side,  and  the 
word  "romanticism  "on  the  other.  "Romantic" 
is  a  useful  but  overworked  adjective  which 
attaches  itself  indiscriminately  to  both  "rom 
ance"  and  "romanticism."  Professor  Vaughan, 
for  example,  and  a  hundred  other  writers,  have 
pointed  out  that  in  the  narrower  and  more  usual 
sense,  the  words  "romance"  and"romanticism" 
point  to  a  love  of  vivid  coloring  and  strongly 
markedcontrasts  ;toacraving  fortheunfamiliar, 
the  marvellous,  and  the  supernatural.  In  the 

[  130  ] 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

wider  and  less  definite  sense,  they  signify  a  revolt 
from  the  purely  intellectual  view  of  man's  na 
ture;  a  recognition  of  the  instincts  and  the  pas 
sions,  a  vague  intimation  of  sympathy  between 
man  and  the  world  around  him,  — in  one  word, 
the  sense  of  mystery.  The  narrower  and  the 
broader  meanings  pass  into  one  another  by  im 
perceptible  shades.  They  are  affected  by  the 
well-known  historic  conditions  for  romantic 
feeling  in  the  different  European  countries.  The 
common  factor,  of  course,  is  the  man  with  the 
romantic  world  set  in  his  heart.  It  is  Gautier 
with  his  love  of  color,  Victor  Hugo  enraptured 
with  the  sound  of  words,  Heine  with  his  self- 
destroying  romantic  irony,  Novalis  with  his 
blue  flower,  and  Maeterlinck  with  his  Blue  Bird. 
But  these  romantic  men  of  letters,  writing 
in  epochs  of  romanticism,  are  by  no  means 
the  only  children  of  romance.  Sir  Humphrey 
Gilbert  and  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  were  as  truly 
followers  of  "  the  gleam"  as  were  Spenser  or 
Marlowe.  The  spirit  of  romance  is  found  wher 
ever  and  whenever  men  say  to  themselves,  as 
Don  Quixote's  niece  said  of  her  uncle,  that 
"  they  wish  better  bread  than  is  made  of  wheat," 
or  when  they  look  within  their  own  hearts,  and 

[131  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

-  assert,  as  the  poet  Young  said  in  1759,  long 
before  the  English  romantic  movement  had 
begun,  "there  is  more  in  the  spirit  of  man  than 
mere  prose-reason  can  fathom." 

We  are  familiar,  perhaps  too  remorsefully 
familiar,  with  the  fact  that  romance  is  likely  to 
run  a  certain  course  in  the  individual  and  then 
to  disappear.  Looking  back  upon  it  afterward, 
it  resembles  the  upward  and  downward  zigzag 
of  a  fever  chart.  It  has  in  fact  often  been  de 
scribed  as  a  measles,  a  disease  of  which  no  one 
can  be  particularly  proud,  although  he  may 
have  no  reason  to  blush  for  it.  Southey  said 
that  he  was  no  more  ashamed  of  having  been 
a  republican  than  of  having  been  a  boy.  Well, 
people  catch  Byronism,  and  get  over  it,  much 
as  Southey  got  over  his  republicanism.  In  fact 
Byron  himself  lived  long  enough  —  though 
he  died  at  thirty-six  —  to  outgrow  his  purely 
"Byronic"  phase,  and  to  smile  at  it  as  know 
ingly  as  we  do.  Coleridge's  blossoming  period 
as  a  romantic  poet  was  tragically  brief.  Keats 
and  Shelley  had  the  good  fortune  to  die  in  the 
fulness  of  their  romantic  glory.  They  did  not 
outlive  their  own  poetic  sense  of  the  wonder 
and  mystery  of  the  world.  Yet  many  an  old 

c 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

poet  like  Tennyson  and  Browning  has  pre 
served  his  romance  to  the  end.  Tennyson  dies 
at  eighty-three  with  the  full  moonlight  stream 
ing  through  the  oriel  window  upon  his  bed, 
and  with  his  fingers  clasping  Shakespeare's 
Cymbeline. 

With  most  of  us  commonplace  persons,  how 
ever,  a  reaction  from  the  romantic  is  almost 
inevitable.  The  romantic  temperament  cannot 
long  keep  the  pitch.  Poe  could  indeed  do  it,  « 
although  he  hovered  at  times  near  the  border 
of  insanity.  Hawthorne  went  for  relief  to  his 
profane  sea-captains  and  the  carnal-minded  su 
perannuated  employees  of  the  Salem  Custom 
House.  "  The  weary  weight  of  all  this  unin 
telligible  world  "  presses  too  hard  on  most  of 
those  who  stop  to  think  about  it.  The  sim 
plest  way  of  relief  is  to  shrug  one's  shoulders 
and  let  the  weight  go.'  That  is  to  say,  we  cease 
being  poets,  we  are  no  longer  the  children  of 
romance,  although  we  may  remain  idealists. 
Perhaps  it  is  external  events  that  change,  rather 
than  we  ourselves.  The  restoration  of  the  Bour 
bons,  the  Revolutions  of  1830  and  1 848,  make  , 
and  unmake  romantics.  Often  society  catches  I 
up  with  the  romanticist ;  he  is  no  longer  a  ( 

[  '33  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

soldier  of  revolt;  he  has  become  a  "  respectable." 
Or,  while  remaining  a  poet,  he  shifts  his  atten 
tion  to  some  more  familiar  segment  of  the  ideal 
istic  circle.  He  sings  about  his  wife  instead  of 
the  wife  of  somebody  else.  Like  Wordsworth, 
he  takes  for  his  theme  a  Mary  Hutchinson  in 
stead  of  the  unknown  and  hauntingly  alluring 
figure  of  Lucy.  To  put  it  differently,  the  high 
light,  the  mysterious  color  of  dawn  or  sunset 
disappears  from  his' picture  of  human  life.  Or, 
the  high  light  may  be  diffused  in  a  more  tran 
quil  radiance  over  the  whole  surface  of  experi 
ence.  Such  an  artist  may  remain  a  true  painter 
or  poet,  but  he  is  not  a  romantic  poet  or  painter 
any  longer.  He  has,  like  the  aging  Emerson, 
taken  in  sail ;  the  god  Terminus  has  said  to  him, 
"  no  more/' 

One  must  of  course  admit  that  the  typical 
romanticist  has  often  been  characterized  by  cer 
tain  intellectual  and  moral  weaknesses.  But  the 
great  romance  men,  like  Edmund  Spenser,  for 
example,  may  not  possess  these  weaknesses  at 
all.  Robert  Louis  Stevenson  was  passionately 
in  love  with  the  romantic  in  life  and  with  ro 
manticism  in  literature ;  but  it  did  not  make  him 
eccentric,  weak,  or  empty.  His  instinct  for  en- 

[  134] 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

during  romance  was  so  admirably  fine  that  it 
brought  strength  to  the  sinews  of  his  mind, 
light  and  air  and  fire  to  his  soul.  Among  the 
writers  of  our  own  day,  it  is  Mr.  Kipling  who 
has  written  some  of  the  keenest  satire  upon 
romantic  foibles,  while  never  ceasing  to  salute 
his  real  mistress,  the  true  romance. 

"  Who  wast,  or  yet  the  Lights  were  set, 

A  whisper  in  the  void, 
Who  shalt  be  sung  through  planets  young 
When  this  is  clean  destroyed." 

What  are  the  causes  of  American  romance, 
the  circumstances  and  qualities  that  have  pro 
duced  the  romantic  element  in  American  life  j 
and  character?  Precisely  as  with  the  individ-  r\ 
ual  artist  or  man  of  letters,  we  touch  first  of  all 
upon  certain  temperamental  inclinations.  It  is 
a  question  again  of  the  national  mind,  of  the 
differentiation  of  the  race  under  new  climatic 
and  physical  conditions.  We  have  to  reckon 
with  the  headiness  and  excitability  of  youth. 
It  was  young  men  who  emigrated  hither,  just  as 
in  the  eighteen-sixties  it  was  young  men  who 
filled  the  Northern  and  the  Southern  armies. 
The  first  generations  of  American  immigration 
were  made  up  chiefly  of  vigorous,  imaginative, 

[  135] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

and  daring  youth.  The  incapables  came  later. 
It  is,  I  think,  safe  to  assert  that  the  colonists 
of  English  stock,  even  as  late  as  1790,  —  when 
more  than  ninety  per  cent  of  the  population 
of  America  had  in  their  veins  the  blood  of  the 
British  Isles, — were  more  responsive  to  ro 
mantic  impulses  than  their  English  cousins. 
For  that  matter,  an  Irishman  or  a  Welshman  is 
more  romantic  than  an  Englishman  to-day. 

From  the  very  beginning  of  the  American 
settlements,  likewise,  there  were  evidences  of  the 
weaker,  the  over-excitable  side  of  the  romantic 
,  temper.  There  were  volatile  men  like  Morton 
of  Merrymount ;  there  were  queer  women  like 
Anne  Hutchinson,  admirable  woman  as  she 
was;  among  the  wives  of  the  colonists  there 
were  plenty  of  Emily  Dickinsons  in  the  germ. 
Among  the  men,  there  were  schemes  that  came 
to  nothing.  There  were  prototypes  of  Colonel 
Sellers;  a  temperamental  tendency  toward  that 
recklessness  and  extravagance  which  later  his 
torical  conditions  stimulated  and  confirmed. 
The  more  completely  one  studies  the  history 
of  our  forefathers  on  American  soil,  the  more 
deeply  does  one  become  conscious  of  the  pre 
vailing  atmosphere  of  emotionalism. 

[  136] 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

Furthermore,  as  one  examines  the  historic 
conditions  under  which  the  spirit  of  American 
romance  has  been  preserved  and  heightened 
from  time  to  time,  one  becomes  aware  that  al 
though  ours  is  rather  a  romance  of  wonder  than 
of  beauty,  the  spirit  of  beauty  is  also  to  be  found. 
The  first  fervors  of  the  romance  of  discovery 
were  childlike  in  their  eagerness.  Hakluyt's 
Voyages,  John  Smith's  True  Relation  of  Virginia, 
Thomas  Morton's  New  England's  Canaan,  all 
appeal  to  the  sense  of  the  marvellous. 

Listen  to  Morton's  description  of  Cape  Ann. 
I  can  never  read  it  without  thinking  of  Botti 
celli's  picture  of  Spring,  so  naively  does  this 
picturesque  rascal  suffuse  his  landscape  with  the 
feeling  for  beauty : — 

"IntheMonethof  June,  AnnoSalutis  1622, 
it  was  my  chaunce  to  arrive  in  the  parts  of  New 
England  with  30.  Servants,  and  provision  of 
all  sorts  fit  for  a  plantation:  and  whiles  our 
howses  were  building,  I  did  indeavour  to  take 
a  survey  of  the  Country  :  The  more  I  looked, 
the  more  I  liked  it.  And  when  I  had  more  seri 
ously  considered  of  the  bewty  of  the  place,  with 
all  her  faire  indowments,  I  did  not  thinke  that 
in  all  the  knowne  world  it  could  be  paralel'd, 

[  137  3 . 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

for  so  many  goodly  groves  of  trees,  dainty  fine 
round  rising  hillucks,  delicate  faire  large  plaines, 
sweete  cristall  fountaines,  and  cleare  running 
streames  that  twine  in  fine  meanders  through 
the  meads,  making  so  sweete  a  murmering  noise 
to  heare  as  would  even  lull  the  sences  with  de 
light  a  sleepe,  so  pleasantly  doe  they  glide  upon 
the  pebble  stones,  jetting  most  jocundly  where 
they  doe  meete  and  hand  in  hand  runne  downe 
to  Neptunes  Court,  to  pay  the  yearely  tribute 
which  they  owe  to  him  as  soveraigne  Lord  of  all 
the  springs.  Contained  within  the  volume  of 
the  Land,  Fowles  in  abundance,  Fish  in  mul 
titude;  and  discovered,  besides,  Millions  of 
Turtledoves  on  thegreene  boughes,  which  sate 
pecking  of  the  full  ripe  pleasant  grapes  that  were 
supported  by  the  lusty  trees,  whose  fruitful 
loade  did  cause  the  armes  to  bend:  while  here 
and  there  dispersed,  you  might  see  Lillies  and 
the  Daphnean-tree:  which  made  the  Land  to 
mee  seeme  paradice  :  for  in  mine  eie  t'was  Na 
tures  Masterpeece  ;  Her  cheifest  Magazine  of 
all  where  lives  her  store :  if  this  Land  be  not 
rich,  then  is  the  whole  world  poore." 

This  is  the  Morton  who,  a  few  years  later, 
settled  at  Merrymount.  Let  me  condense  the 

[  '38] 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

story  of  his  settlement,  from  the  narrative  of 
the  stout-hearted  Governor  William  Bradford's 
History  of  Plymouth  Plantation  :  — 

"  And  Morton  became  lord  of  misrule,  and 
maintained  (as  it  were)  a  schoole  of  Athisme. 
And  after  they  had  gott  some  good  into  their 
hands,  and  gott  much  by  trading  with  the  Inde- 
ans,  they  spent  it  as  vainly,  in  quaffing  &  drink 
ing  both  wine  &  strong  waters  in  great  exsess, 
and,  as  some  reported  io£.  worth  in  a  morning. 
They  allso  set  up  a  May-pole,  drinking  and 
dancingaboute  it  many  daystogeather,  inviting 
the  Indean  women,  for  their  consorts,  dancing 
and  frisking  togither,  (like  so  many  fairies,  or 
furies  rather,)  and  worse  practises.  As  if  they 
had  anew  revived  &  celebrated  the  feasts  of  the 
Roman  Goddes  Flora,  or  the  beasly  practieses 
of  the  madd  Bacchinalians.  Morton  likewise 
(to  shew  his  poetrie)  composed  sundry  rimes 
&  verses,  some  tending  to  lasciviousnes,  and 
others  to  the  detraction  &  scandall  of  some  per 
sons,  which  he  affixed  to  this  idle  or  idoll  May- 
polle.  They  chainged  allso  the  name  of  their 
place,  and  in  stead  of  calling  it  Mounte  Wol- 
laston,  they  call  it  Merie-mounte,  as  if  this 
joylity  would  have  lasted  ever." 

C   T39  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

But  it  did  not  last  long.  Bradford  and  other 
leaders  of  the  plantations  "  agreed  by  mutual 
consent "  to  "  suppress  Morton  and  his  con 
sorts.  "  "  In  a  friendly  and  neighborly  way  " 
they  admonished  him.  "  Insolently  he  per 
sisted."  "  Upon  which  they  saw  there  was  no 
way  but  to  take  him  by  force."  "  So  they  mu 
tually  resolved  to  proceed,"  and  sent  Captain 
Standish  to  summon  him  to  yield.  But,  says 
Bradford,  Morton  and  some  of  his  crew  came 
out,  not  to  yield,  but  to  shoot;  all  of  them 
rather  drunk ;  Morton  himself,  with  a  carbine 
almost  half  filled  with  powder  and  shot,  had 
thought  to  have  shot  Captain  Standish, "  but  he 
stepped  to  him  and  put  by  his  piece  and  took  him." 
It  is  not  too  fanciful  to  say  that  with  those 
stern  words  of  Governor  Bradford  the  English 
Renaissance  came  to  an  end.  The  dream  of  a 
*  lawless  liberty  which  has  been  dreamed  and 
dreamed  out  so  many  times  in  the  history  of 
the  world  was  over,  for  many  a  day.  It  was 
only  a  hundred  years  earlier  that  Rabelais  had 
written  over  the  doors  of  his  ideal  abbey,  the 
motto  "  Do  what  thou  wilt."  It  is  true  that 
Rabelais  proposed  to  admit  to  his  Abbey  of 
Theleme  only  such  men  and  women  as  were 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

virtuously  inclined.  We  do  not  know  how 
many  persons  would  have  been  able  and  willing 
to  go  into  residence  there.  At  any  rate,  two 
hundred  years  went  by  in  New  England  after 
the  fall  of  Morton  before  any  notable  spirit 
dared  to  cherish  once  more  the  old  Renaissance 
ideal.  At  last,  in  Emerson's  doctrine  that  all 
things  are  lawful  because  Nature  is  good  and 
human  nature  is  divine,  we  have  a  curious  par 
allel  to  the  doctrine  of  Rabelais.  It  was  the 
old  romance  of  human  will  under  a  new  form 
and  voiced  in  new  accents.  Yet  in  due  time  the 
hard  facts  of  human  nature  reasserted  them 
selves  and  put  this  romantic  transcendentalism 
by,  even  as  the  implacable  Myles  Standish  put 
by  that  heavily  loaded  fowling-piece  of  the 
drunken  Morton. 

But  men  believed  in  miracles  in  the  first  cen 
tury  of  colonization,  and  they  will  continue  at 
intervals  to  believe  in  them  until  human  nature 
is  no  more.  The  marvellous  happenings  re 
corded  in  Cotton  Mather's  Magnalia  no  longer 
excite  us  to  any  "  suspension  of  disbelief." 
We  doubt  the  story  of  Pocahontas.  The  fresh 
romantic  enthusiasm  of  a  settler  like  Creve- 
cceur  seems  curiously  juvenile  to-day,  as  does 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

the  romantic  curiosity  of  Chateaubriand  con 
cerning  the  Mississippi  and  the  Choctaws,  or 
the  zeal  of  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  over 
their  dream  of  a  "  panti-Socratic  "  community 
in  the  unknown  valley  of  the  musically-sound 
ing  Susquehanna.  Inexperience  is  a  perpetual 
feeder  of  the  springs  of  romance.  John  Wesley, 
it  will  be  remembered,  went  out  to  the  colony 
of  Georgia  full  of  enthusiasm  for  converting 
the  Indians ;  but  as  he  naively  remarks  in  his 
Journal,  he  "  neither  found  or  heard  of  any  In 
dians  on  the  continent  of  America,  who  had  the 
least  desire  of  being  instructed."  The  sense  of 
fact,  in  other  words,  supervenes,  and  the  glory 
disappears  from  the  face  of  romance.  The  hu 
mor  of  Mark  Twain's  Innocents  Abroad  turns 
largely  upon  this  sense  of  remorseless  fact  con 
fronting  romantic  inexperience. 

American  history,  however,  has  been  marked 
by  certain  great  romantic  passions  that  seem 
endowed  with  indestructible  vitality.  The  ro 
mance  of  discovery,  the  fascination  of  the  for 
est  and  sea,  the  sense  of  danger  and  mystery 
once  aroused  by  the  very  word  "redskin,"  have 
all  moulded  and  will  continue  to  mould  the 
national  imagination.  How  completely  the 

[  142  ] 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

romance  of  discovery  may  be  fused  with  the 
glow  of  humanitarian  and  religious  enthusiasm 
has  been  shown  once  for  all  in  the  brilliant 
pages  of  Parkman's  story  of  the  Jesuit  missions 
in  Canada.  Pictorial  romance  can  scarcely  go 
further  than  this.  In  the  crisis  of  Chateau 
briand's  picturesque  and  passionate  tale  of  the 
American  wilderness,  no  one  can  escape  the 
thrilling,  haunting  sound  of  the  bell  from  the 
Jesuit  chapel,  as  it  tolls  in  the  night  and  storm 
that  were  fatal  to  the  happiness  of  Atala.  One 
scarcely  need  say  that  the  romance  of  missions 
has  never  faded  from  the  American  mind.  I 
have  known  a  sober  New  England  deacon  aged 
eighty-five,  who  disliked  to  die  because  he 
thought  he  should  miss  the  monthly  excite 
ment  of  reading  the  Missionary  Herald.  The 
deacon's  eyes,  like  the  eyes  of  many  an  old  sea- 
captain  in  Salem  or  Newburyport,  were  liter 
ally  upon  the  ends  of  the  earth.  No  one  can 
reckon  how  many  starved  souls,  deprived  of 
normal  outlet  for  human  feeling,  have  found 
in  this  passionate  curiosity  and  concern  for  the 
souls  of  black  and  yellow  men  and  women  in 
the  antipodes,  a  constant  source  of  beneficent 
excitement. 

[  143] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

Nor  is  there  any  diminution  of  interest  in  the 
mere  romance  of  adventure,  in  the  stories  of 
hunter  and  trapper,  the  journals  of  Lewis  and 
Clarke,  the  narratives  of  Boone  and  Crockett. 
In  writing  his  superb  romances  of  the  North 
ern  Lakes,  the  prairie  and  the  sea,  Fenimore 
Cooper  had  merely  to  bring  to  an  artistic  focus 
sentiments  that  lay  deep  in  the  souls  of  the 
great  mass  of  his  American  readers.  Students 
of  our  social  life  have  pointed  out  again  and 
again  how  deeply  our  national  temperament 
has  been  affected  by  the  existence,  during 
nearly  three  hundred  years,  of  an  alien  aborig 
inal  race  forever  lurking  upon  the  borders  of 
our  civilization.  "  Playing  Indian  "  has  been 
immensely  significant,  not  merely  in  stimulat 
ing  the  outdoor  activity  of  generations  of 
American  boys,  but  in  teaching  them  the  per 
ennial  importance  of  certain  pioneer  qualities 
of  observation,  resourcefulness,  courage,  and 
endurance  which  date  from  the  time  when  the 
Indians  were  a  daily  and  nightly  menace.  Even 
when  the  Indian  has  been  succeeded  by  the 
cowboy,  the  spirit  of  romance  still  lingers, — 
as  any  collection  of  cowboy  ballads  will  abun 
dantly  prove.  And  when  the  cowboys  pass, 

[  '44  ] 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

and  the  real-estate  dealers  take  possession  of 
the  field,  one  is  tempted  to  say  that  romance 
flourishes  more  than  ever. 

In  short,  things  are  what  we  make  them  at 
the  moment,  what  we  believe  them  to  be.  In 
my  grandfather's  youth  the  West  was  in  the 
neighborhood  of  Port  Byron,  New  York,  and 
when  he  journeyed  thither  from  Massachu 
setts  in  the  eighteen-twenties,  the  glory  of  ad 
venture  enfolded  him  as  completely  as  the  boys 
of  the  preceding  generation  had  been  glorified 
in  the  War  of  the  Revolution,  or  the  boys  of 
the  next  generation  when  they  went  gold-seek 
ing  in  California  in  1849.  The  West,  in  short, 
means  simply  the  retreating  horizon,  the  beck 
oning  finger  of  opportunity.  Like  Boston,  it 
has  been  not  a  place,  but  a  "state  of  mind." 

"  We  must  go,  go,  go  away  from  here, 

On  the  other  side  the  world  we're  overdue." 

That  is  the  song  which  sings  itself  forever 
in  the  heart  of  youth.  Champlain  and  Cartier 
heard  it  in  the  sixteenth  century,  Bradford  no 
less  than  Morton  in  the  seventeenth.  Some 
Eldorado  has  always  been  calling  to  the  more 
adventurous  spirits  upon  American  soil.  The 

C 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

passion  of  the  forty-niner  neither  began  nor 
ended  with  the  discovery  of  gold  in  California. 
It  is  within  us.  It  transmutes  the  harsh  or 
drab-colored  everyday  routine  into  tissue  of 
fairyland.  It  makes  our  "  winning  of  the 
West"  a  magnificent  national  epic.  It  changes 
to-day  the  black  belt  of  Texas,  or  the  wheat- 
fields  of  Dakota,  into  pots  of  gold  that  lie  at 
the  end  of  rainbows,  only  that  the  pot  of  gold 
is  actually  there.  The  human  hunger  of  it  all, 
the  gorgeous  dream-like  quality  of  it  all,  the 
boundlessness  of  the  vast  American  spaces,  the 
sense  of  forest  and  prairie  and  sky,  are  all  in 
explicably  blended  with  our  notion  of  the  ideal 
America.  Henry  James  once  tried  to  explain 
the  difference  between  Turgenieff  and  a  typical 
French  novelist  by  saying  that  the  back  door 
of  the  Russian's  imagination  was  always  open 
upon  the  endless  Russian  steppe.  No  one  can 
understand  the  spirit  of  American  romance  if 
he  is  not  conscious  of  this  ever-present  hinter 
land  in  which  our  spirits  have,  from  the  begin 
ning,  taken  refuge  and  found  solace. 

We  have  already  noticed,  in  the  chapter  on 
idealism,  how  swiftly  the  American  imagina 
tion  modifies  the  prosaic  facts  of  everyday 

[  146] 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

experience.  The  idealistic  glamour  which  falls 
upon  the  day's  work  changes  easily,  in  the 
more  emotional  temperaments,  and  at  times, 
indeed,  in  all  of  us,  into  the  fervor  of  true  ro 
mance.  Then,  the  prosaic  buying  and  selling 
becomes  the  "  game.'*  A  combination  of  buy 
ers  and  sellers  becomes  the  "  system."  The 
place  where  these  buyers  and  sellers  most  do 
congregate  and  concentrate  becomes  "  Wall 
Street  "  —  a  sort  of  anthropomorphic  monster 
which  seems  to  buy  and  sell  the  bodies  and  souls 
of  men.  Seen  half  acontinent  away,  through  the 
mists  of  ignorance  and  prejudice  and  partisan 
passion,  "  Wall  Street  "  has  loomed  like  some 
vast  Gibraltar.  To  the  broker's  clerk  who  earns 
his  weekly  salary  in  that  street,  the  Nebraska 
notion  of  "  Wall  Street "  is  too  grotesque  for 
discussion. 

How  easily  every  phase  of  American  busi 
ness  life  may  take  on  the  hues  of  romance  is 
illustrated  by  the  history  of  our  railroads.  No 
wonder  that  Bret  Harte  wrote  a  poem  about 
the  meeting  of  the  eastward  and  westward  fac 
ing  engines  when  the  two  sections  of  the  Union 
Pacific  Railroad  at  last  drew  near  each  other 
on  the  interminable  plains  and  the  two  engines 

C  -47] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

could  talk.  Of  course  what  they  said  was 
poetry.  There  was  a  time  when  even  the  Erie 
Canal  was  poetic.  The  Panama  Canal  to-day,  in 
the  eyes  of  most  Americans,  is  something  other 
than  a  mere  feat  of  engineering.  We  are  doing 
-more  than  making  "the  dirt  fly."  The  canal 
represents  victory  over  hostile  forces,  conquest 
of  unwilling  Nature,  achievement  of  what  had 
long  been  deemed  impossible,  the  making  not 
of  a  ditch,  but  of  History. 

So  with  all  that  American  zest  for  camping, 
fishing,  sailing,  racing,  which  lies  deep  in  the 
Anglo-Saxon,  and  which  succeeds  to  the  more 
primitive  era  of  actual  struggle  against  savage 
beasts  or  treacherous  men  or  mysterious  for 
ests.  It  is  at  once  an  outlet  and  a  nursery  for 
romantic  emotion.  The  out-of-doors  move 
ment  which  began  with  Thoreau's  hut  on  Wai- 
den  Pond,  and  which  has  gone  on  broadening 
and  deepening  to  this  hour,  implies  far  more 
than  mere  variation  from  routine.  It  furnishes, 
indeed,  a  healthful  escape  from  the  terrific  pres 
sure  of  modern  social  and  commercial  exigen 
cies.  Yet  its  more  important  function  is  to  pro 
vide  for  grown-ups  a  chance  to  "  play  Indian  " 
too. 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

But  outdoors  and  indoors,  after  all,  lie  in  the 
heart  and  mind,  rather  than  in  the  realm  of 
actual  experience.  The  romantic  imagination 
insists  upon  taking  its  holiday,  whether  the 
man  who  possesses  it  gets  his  holiday  or  not. 
I  have  never  known  a  more  truly  romantic 
figure  than  a  certain  tin-pedler  in  Connecticut 
who,  in  response  to  the  question,  "  Do  you  do 
a  good  business  ? "  made  this  perfectly  Steven- 
sonian  reply:  "Well,  I  make  a  living  selling 
crockery  and  tinware,  but  my  business  is  the 
propagation  of  truth." 

This  wandering  idealist  may  serve  to  remind 
us  again  of  the  difference  between  romance  and 
romanticism.  The  true  romance  is  of  the  spirit. 
Romanticism  shifts  and  changes  with  external 
fortunes,  with  altering  emotions,  with  the  alter 
nate  play  of  light  and  shade  over  the  vast  land 
scape  of  human  experience.  The  typical  ro 
manticist,  as  we  have  seen,  is  a  man  of  moods. 
It  is  only  a  Poe  who  can  keep  the  pitch  through 
the  whole  concert  of  experience.  But  the  deeper 
romance  of  the  spirit  is  oblivious  of  these  changes 
of  external  fortune,  this  rising  or  falling  of 
the  emotional  temperature.  The  moral  life  of 
America  furnishes  striking  illustrations  of  the 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

steadfastness  with  which  certain  moral  causes 
have  been  kept,  as  it  were,  in  the  focus  of  in 
tense  feeling.  Poetry,  undefeated  and  unwa 
vering  poetry,  has  transfigured  such  practical 
propaganda  as  the  abolition  of  slavery,  the 
emancipation  of  woman,  the  fight  against  the 
liquor  traffic,  the  emancipation  of  the  individual 
from  the  clutches  of  economic  and  commercial 
despotism.  Men  like  Colonel  Thomas  Went- 
worth  Higginson,  women  like  Julia  Ward 
Howe,  fought  for  these  causes  throughout  their 
lives.  Colonel  Higginson's  attitude  towards 
women  was  not  merely  chivalric  (for  one  may 
be  chivalrous  without  any  marked  predisposi 
tion  to  romance),  but  nobly  romantic  also. 
James  Russell  Lowell,  poet  as  he  was,  outlived 
that  particular  phase  of  romantic  moral  reform 
which  he  had  been  taught  by  Maria  White.  But 
in  other  men  and  women  bred  in  that  old  New 
England  of  the  eighteen-forties,  the  moral  fer 
vor  knew  no  restraint.  Garrison,  although  in 
many  respects  a  most  unromantic  personality, 
was  engaged  in  a  task  which  gave  him  all  the 
inspiration  of  romance.  A  romantic  "atmo 
sphere,"  fully  as  highly  colored  as  any  of  the 
romantic  atmospheres  that  we  are  accustomed 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

to  mark  in  literature,  surrounded  as  with  a 
luminous  mist  the  figures  of  the  New  England 
transcendentalists.  They,  too,  as  Heine  said  of 
himself,  were  soldiers.  They  felt  themselves 
enlisted  for  a  long  but  ultimately  victorious 
campaign.  They  were  willing  to  pardon,  in 
their  comrades  and  in  themselves,  those  im 
aginative  excesses  which  resemble  the  physical 
excesses  ofa soldier's  camp.  Transcendentalism 
was  thus  a  militant  philosophy  and  religion, 
with  both  a  destructively  critical  and  a  posi 
tively  constructive  creed.  Channing,  Parker, 
Alcott,  Margaret  Fuller,  were  warrior-priests, 
poets  and  prophets  of  a  gallant  campaign 
against  inherited  darkness  and  bigotry,  and  for 
the  light. 

The  atmosphere  of  that  score  of  years  in 
New  England  was  now  superheated,  now 
rarefied,  thin,  and  cold;  but  it  was  never 
quite  the  normal  atmosphere  of  every  day.  On 
the  purely  literary  side,  it  is  needless  to  say, 
these  men  and  women  sought  inspiration  in 
Coleridge  and  Carlyle  and  other  English  and 
German  romanticists.  In  fact,  the  most  endur 
ing  literature  of  New  England  between  1830 
and  1865  was  distinctly  a  romantic  literature. 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

It  was  rooted,  however,  not  so  much  in  those 
swift  changes  of  historic  condition,  those  start 
ling  liberations  of  the  human  spirit  which  gave 
inspiration  to  the  romanticism  of  the  Conti 
nent,  as  it  was  in  the  deep  and  vital  fervor  with 
which  these  New  Englanders  envisaged  the 
problems  of  the  moral  life. 

Other  illustrations  of  the  American  capacity 
for  romance  lie  equally  close  at  hand.  Take,  for 
instance,  the  stout  volume  in  which  Mr.  Bur 
ton  Stevenson  has  collected  the  Poems  of  Ameri 
can  History.  Here  are  nearly  seven  hundred 
pages  of  closely  printed  patriotic  verse.  While 
Stedman's  Anthology  reveals  no  doubt  national 
aspirations  and  national  sentiment,  as  well  as 
the  emotional  fervor  of  individuals,  Mr.  Stev 
enson's  collection  has  the  advantage  of  focus 
sing  this  national  feeling  upon  specific  events. 
Stedman's  Anthology  is  an  enduring  document 
of  American  idealism,  touching  in  the  sincerity 
of  its  poetic  moods,  pathetic  in  its  long  lists 
of  men  and  women  who  are  known  by  one 
poem  only,  or  who  have  never,  for  one  reason 
or  another,  fulfilled  their  poetic  promise.  The 
thousand  poems  which  it  contains  are  more 
striking,  in  fact,  for  their  promise  than  for  their 

[  is*] 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

performance.  They  are  intimations  of  what 
American  men  and  women  would  have  liked 
to  do  or  to  be.  In  this  sense,  it  is  a  precious 
volume,  but  it  is  certainly  not  commensurate, 
either  in  passion  or  in  artistic  perfection,  with 
the  forces  of  that  American  life  which  it  tries 
to  interpret.  Indeed,  Mr.  Stedman,  after  fin 
ishing  his  task  of  compilation,  remarked  to 
more  than  one  of  his  friends  that  what  this 
country  needed  was  some  "  adult  male  verse." 
The  Poems  of  American  History  collected  by 
Mr.  Stevenson  are  at  least  vigorous  and  con 
crete.  One  aspect  of  our  history  which  espe 
cially  lends  itself  to  Mr.  Stevenson's  purpose 
is  the  romance  which  attaches  itself  to  war.  It 
is  scarcely  necessary  to  say  nowadays  that  all 
wars,  even  the  noblest,  have  had  their  sordid, 
grimy,  selfish,  bestial  aspect ;  and  that  the  intel 
ligence  and  conscience  of  our  modern  world 
are  more  and  more  engaged  in  the  task  of  mak 
ing  future  wars  impossible.  But  the  slightest 
acquaintance]  with  American  history  reveals 
the  immense  reservoir  of  romantic  emotion 
which  has  been  drawn  upon  in  our  national 
struggles.  War,  of  course,  is  an  immemorial 
source  of  romantic  feeling.  William  James's 

[  153] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

notable  essay  on  "  A  Moral  Substitute  for 
War  "  endeavored  to  prove  that  our  modern 
economic  and  social  life,  if  properly  organized, 
would  give  abundant  outlet  and  satisfaction  to 
those  romantic  impulses  which  formerly  found 
their  sole  gratification  in  battle.  Many  of  us 
believe  that  he  was  right ;  but  for  the  moment 
we  must  look  backward  and  not  forward.  We 
must  remember  the  stern  if  rude  poetry  in 
spired  by  our  Revolutionary  struggle,  the  ro 
mantic  halo  that  falls  upon  the  youthful  figure 
of  Nathan  Hale,  the  baleful  light  that  touches 
the  pale  face  of  Benedict  Arnold,  the  romance 
of  the  Bennington  fight  to  the  followers  of 
Stark  and  Ethan  Allen,  the  serene  voice  of 
the  "little  captain,"  John  Paul  Jones:  —  "We 
have  not  struck,  we  have  just  begun  our  part 
of  the  fighting."  The  colors  of  romance  still 
drape  the  Chesapeake  and  the  Shannon,  Te- 
cumseh  and  Tippecanoe.  The  hunters  of  Ken 
tucky,  the  explorers  of  the  Yellowstone  and  the 
Columbia,  the  emigrants  who  left  their  bones 
along  the  old  Santa  Fe  Trail,  are  our  Homeric 
men. 

The  Mexican  War  affords  pertinent  illustra 
tion,  not  only  of  romance,  but  of  reaction.  The 

[  154] 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

earlier  phases  of  the  Texan  struggle  for  inde 
pendence  have  much  of  the  daring,  the  splendid 
rashness,  the  glorious  and  tragic  catastrophes 
of  the  great  romantic  adventures  of  the  Old 
World.  It  is  not  the  Texans  only  who  still 
"remember  the  Alamo,"  but  when  those  bril 
liant  and  dramatic  adventures  of  border  war 
fare  became  drawn  into  the  larger  struggle  for 
the  extension  of  slavery,  the  poetic  reaction  be 
gan.  The  physical  and  moral  pretence  of  war 
fare,  the  cheap  splendors  of  epaulets  and  feath 
ers,  shrivelled  at  the  single  touch  of  the  satire 
of  the  Biglow  Papers.  Lowell,  writing  at  that 
moment  with  the  instinct  and  fervor  of  a  pro 
phet,  brought  the  whole  vainglorious  business 
back  to  the  simple  issue  of  right  and  wrong : 

"  'Taint  your  eppyletts  an'  feathers 

Make  the  thing  a  grain  more  right ; 
'Taint  afollerin'  your  bell-wethers 

Will  excuse  ye  in  His  sight ; 
Ef  you  take  a  sword  an'  dror  it, 

An'  go  stick  a  feller  thru, 
Guv'ment  aint  to  answer  for  it, 

God' 11  send  the  bill  to  you." 

But  far  more  interesting  is  the  revelation  of 
the  American  capacity  for  romance  which  was 

[  155  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

made  possible  by  the  war  between  the  States. 
Stevenson's  Poems  of  American  History  and 
Stedman's  Anthology  give  abundant  illustration 
of  almost  every  aspect  of  that  epical  struggle. 
The  South  was  in  a  romantic  mood  from  the 
very  beginning.  The  North  drifted  into  it  after 
Sumter.  I  have  already  said  that  no  one  can 
examine  a  collection  of  Civil  War  verse  with 
out  being  profoundly  moved  by  its  evidence 
of  American  idealism.  I  n  specific  phases  of  the 
struggle,  in  connection  with  certain  battle-fields 
and  certain  leaders  of  both  North  and  South, 
this  idealism  is  heightened  into  pure  romance, 
so  that  even  our  novelists  feel  that  they  can 
give  no  adequate  picture  of  the  war  without 
using  the  colors  of  poetry.  Most  critics,  no 
doubt,  agree  in  feeling  that  we  are  still  too 
near  to  that  epoch-making  crisis  of  our  national 
existence  to  do  it  any  justice  in  the  terms  of 
literature.  Perhaps  we  must  wait  for  the  per 
fected  romance  of  the  years  1 861-65,  until  the 
men  and  the  events  of  that  struggle  are  as 
remote  as  the  heroes  of  Greece  and  Troy.  Cer 
tainly  no  one  can  pass  a  final  judgment  upon 
the  verse  occasioned  by  recent  struggles  in 
arms.  Any  one  who  has  studied  the  English 

[  '56] 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

poetry  inspired  by  the  South-African  War  will 
be  painfully  conscious  of  the  emotional  and 
moral  complexity  of  all  such  issues,  of  the  bit 
ter  injustice  which  poets,  as  well  as  other  men, 
render  to  one  another,  of  the  impossibility  of 
transmuting  into  the  pure  gold  of  romance  the 
emotions  originating  in  the  stock  market,  in 
race-hatred,  and  in  national  vainglory. 

We  have  lingered  too  long,  perhaps,  over 
these  various  evidences  of  the  romantic  tem 
per  of  America.  We  must  now  glance  at  the 
forces  of  reaction,  the  recoil  to  fact.  What 
is  it  which  contradicts,  inhibits,  or  negatives 
the  romantic  tendency?  Among  other  forces, 
there  is  certainly  humor.  Humor  and  romance 
often  go  hand  in  hand,  but  humor  is  commonly 
fatal  to  romanticism.  There  is  satire,  which  re 
bukes  both  romanticism  and  romance,  which 
exposes  the  fallacies  of  the  one,  and  punctures 
the  exuberance  of  the  other.  More  effective, 
perhaps,  than  either  humor  or  satire  as  an  an 
tiseptic  against  romance,  is  the  overmastering 
sense  of  fact.  This  is  what  Emerson  called  the 
instinct  for  the  milk  in  the  pan,  an  instinct 
which  Emerson  himself  possessed  extraordi 
narily  on  his  purely  Yankee  side,  and  which  a 

[  157] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

pioneer  country  is  forced  continually  to  develop 
and  to  recognize.  Camping,  for  instance,  de 
velops  both  the  romantic  sense  and  the  fact 
sense.  Supper  must  be  cooked,  even  at  Wai- 
den  Pond.  There  must  be  hewers  of  wood  and 
drawers  of  water,  and  the  dishes  ought  to  be 
washed. 

On  a  higher  plane,  also,  than  this  mere 
sense  of  physical  necessity,  there  are  forces 
limiting  the  influence  of  romance.  Schiller  put 
it  all  into  one  famous  line:  — 

"  Und  was  uns  alle  bandigt,  das  Gemeine." 

Or  listen  to  Keats  :  — 

"  'T  is  best  to  remain  aloof  from  people,  and 
like  their  good  parts,  without  being  eternally 
troubled  with  the  dull  process  of  their  every 
day  lives.  .  .  .  All  I  can  say  is  that  standing  at 
Charing  Cross,  and  looking  East,  West,  North 
and  South,  I  can  see  nothing  but  dullness." 

And  Henry  James,  describing  New  York  in 
his  book,  ^he  American  Scene >  speaks  of  "the 
overwhelming  preponderance  of  the  unmiti 
gated  c  business-man  '  face  .  .  .  the  consum 
mate  monotonous  commonness  of  the  pushing 
male  crowd,  moving  in  its  dense- mass  —  with 

[  158  ] 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

the  confusion  carried  to  chaos  for  any  intelli 
gence,  any  perception;  a  welter  of  objects  and 
sounds  in  which  relief,  detachment,  dignity, 
meaning,  perished  utterly  and  lost  all  rights 
.  .  .  the  universal  will  to  move  —  to  move, 
move,  move,  as  an  end  in  itself,  an  appetite  at 
any  price." 

One  need  not  be  a  poet  like  Keats  or  an  in 
veterate  psychologist  like  Henry  James,  in  or 
der  to  become  aware  how  the  commonplaceness 
of  the  world  rests  like  a  fog  upon  the  mind  and 
heart.  No  one  goes  to  his  day's  work  ancT" 
comes  home  again  without  a  consciousness  of 
contact  with  an  unspiritual  atmosphere,  or  in 
completely  spiritualized  forces,  not  merely  with 
indifference,  to  what  Emerson  would  term 
"  the  over-soul,"  but  with  a  lack  of  any  faith 
in  the  things  which  are  unseen.  Take  those 
very  forces  which  have  limited  the  influence  of 
Emerson  throughout  the  United  States  ;  they 
illustrate  the  universal  forces  which  clip  the 
wings  of  romance.  The  obstacles  in  the  path 
of  Emerson's  influence  are  not  merely  the  re 
ligious  and  denominational  differences  which 
Dr.  George  A.  Gordon  portrayed  in  a  notable 
article  at  the  time  of  the  Emerson  Centenary. 

[  159] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

The  real  obstacles  are  more  serious.  It  is  true 
that  Dr.  Park  of  Andover,  Dr.  Bushnell  of 
Hartford,  and  Dr.  Hodge  of  Princeton,  could 
say  in  Emerson's  lifetime :  "  We  know  a  bet 
ter,  a  more  Scriptural  and  certificated  road  to 
ward  the  very  things  which  Emerson  is  seeking 
for.  We  do  not  grant  that  we  are  less  idealistic 
than  he.  We  think  him  a  dangerous  guide,  fol 
lowing  wandering  fires.  It  is  better  to  journey 
safely  with  us." 

But  I  have  known  at  least  two  livery-stable 
keepers  and  many  college  professors  who  would 
unite  in  saying:  "  Hodge  and  Park  and  Bush 
nell  and  Emerson  are  all  following  after  some 
thing  that  does  not  exist.  One  is  not  much 
more  mistaken  than  the  others.  We  can  get 
along  perfectly  well  in  our  business  without  any 
of  those  ideas  at  all.  Let  us  stick  to  the  milk 
in  the  pan,  the  horse  in  the  stall,  the  documents 
which  you  will  find  in  the  library." 

There  exists,  in  other  words,  in  all  classes 
of  American  society  to-day  Just  as  there  existed 
during  the  Revolution,  during  the  transcenden 
tal  movement,  or  the  Civil  War,  an  immense 
mass  of  unspiritualized,  unvitalized  Ameri 
can  manhood  and  womanhood.  No  literature 
[  160] 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

comes  from  it  and  no  religion,  though  there  is 
much  human  kindness,  much  material  progress, 
and  some  indestructible  residuum  of  that  ideal 
ism  which  lifts  man  above  the  brute. 

Yet  the  curious  and  the  endlessly  fascinating 
thing  about  these  forces  of  reaction  is  that  they 
themselves  shift  and  change.  We  have  seen 
that  external  romance  depending  upon  strange 
ness  of  scene,  novelty  of  adventure,  rich  atmo 
spheric  distance  of  space  or  time,  disappears 
with  the  changes  of  civilization.  The  farm  ex 
pands  over  the  wolf's  den,  the  Indian  becomes 
a  blacksmith,  but  do  the  gross  and  material 
instincts  ultimately  triumph  ?  He  would  be  a 
hardy  prophet  who  should  venture  to  assert  it. 
We  must  reckon  always  with  the  swing  of  the 
human  pendulum,  with  the  reaction  against  re 
action.  Here,  for  example,  during  the  last  de 
cade,  has  been  book  after  book  written  about 
the  reaction  against  democracy.  All  over  the 
world,it  is  asserted,  there  are  unmistakable  signs 
that  democracy  will  not  practically  work  in  the 
face  of  the  modern  tasks  to  which  the  world 
has  set  itself.  One  reads  these  books,  one  per 
suades  himself  that  the  hour  for  democracy  is 
passing,  and  then  one  goes  out  on  the  street 
[  161  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

and  buys  a  morning  newspaper  and  discovers 
that  democracy  has  scored  again.  So  is  it  with 
the  experience  of  the  individual.  You  may 
fancy  that  the  romance  of  the  seas  passes,  for 
you,  with  the  passing  of  the  square-sailed  ship. 
If  Mr.  Kipling's  poetry  cannot  rouse  you  from 
that  mood  of  reaction,  walk  down  to  the  end 
of  the  pier  to-morrow  and  watch  the  ocean 
liner  come  up  the  harbor.  If  there  is  no  ro 
mance  there,  you  do  not  know  romance  when 
you  see  it ! 

Take  the  case  of  the  farmer ;  his  prosaic  life 
is  the  butt  of  the  newspaper  paragraphers  from 
one  end  of  the  country  to  the  other.  But  does 
romance  disappear  from  the  farm  with  machin 
ery  and  scientific  agriculture  ?  There  are  far 
mers  who  follow  Luther  Burbank's  experi 
ments  with  plants,  with  all  the  fascination 
which  used  to  attach  to  alchemy  and  astrology. 
The  farmer  has  no  longer  Indians  to  fight  or 
a  wilderness  to  subdue,  but  the  soils  of  his 
farm  are  analyzed  at  his  state  university  by 
men  who  live  in  the  daily  atmosphere  of  the 
romance  of  science,  and  who  say,  as  a  profes 
sor  in  the  University  of  Chicago  said  once, 
that  "a  flower  is  so  wonderful  that  if  you  knew 

[  162] 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

what  was  going  on  within  its  cell-structure, 
you  would  be  afraid  to  stay  alone  with  it  in 
the  dark." 

The  reaction  from  romance,  therefore,  real 
as  it  is,  and  dead  weight  as  it  lies  upon  the 
soul  of  the  nation,  often  breeds  the  very  forces 
which  destroy  it.  In  other  words,  the  reaction 
against  one  type  of  romance  produces  inevita 
bly  another  type  of  romance,  other  aspects  of 
wonder,  terror,  and  beauty.  Following  the  ro 
mance  of  ad  venture  comes,  after  never  so  deep 
a  trough  in  the  sea,  the  romance  of  science,  like 
the  crest  of  another  wave ;  and  then  comes  what 
we  call,  for  lack  of  a  better  word,  the  psycho 
logical  romance,  the  old  mystery  and  strange 
ness  of  the  human  soul,  ^schylus  and  Job,  as 
Victor  Hugo  says,  in  the  poor  crawfish  gatherer 
on  the  rocks  of  Brittany. 

We  must  remember  that  we  are  endeavoring 
to  measure  great  spaces  and  to  take  account 
of  the  "  amplitude  of  time."  The  individual 
"fact-man,"  as  Coleridge  called  him,  remains 
perhaps  a  fact-man  to  the  end,  just  as  the 
dreamer  may  remain  a  dreamer.  But  no  single 
generation  is  compounded  all  of  fact  or  all  of 
dream.  Longfellow  felt,  no  doubt,  that  there 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

was  an  ideal  United  States,  which  Dickens  did 
not  discover  during  that  first  visit  of  1 842  ;  he 
would  have  set  the  Cambridge  which  he  knew 
over  against  the  Cincinnati  viewed  by  Mrs. 
Trollope  ;  he  would  have  asserted  that  the 
homes  characterized  by  refinement,  by  cultiva 
tion,  by  pure  and  simple  sentiment,  made  up 
the  true  America.  But  even  among  Longfel 
low's  own  contemporaries  there  was  Whitman, 
who  felt  that  the  true  America  was  something 
very  different  from  that  exquisitely  tempered 
ideal  of  Longfellow.  There  was  Thoreau,  who, 
over  in  Concord,  had  been  pushing  forward 
the  frontier  of  the  mind  and  senses,  who  had 
opened  his  back-yard  gate,  as  it  were,  upon  the 
boundless  and  mysterious  territory  of  Nature. 
There  was  Emerson,  who  was  preaching  an 
intellectual  independence  of  the  Old  World 
which  should  correspond  to  the  political  and 
social  independence  of  the  Western  Hemi 
sphere.  There  was  Parkman,  whose  hatred  of 
philanthropy,  whose  lack  of  spirituality,  is  a 
striking  illustration  of  the  rebound  of  New 
England  idealism  against  itself,  of  the  reaction 
into  stoicism.  What  different  worlds  these  men 
lived  in,  and  yet  they  were  all  inhabitants,  so  to 


ROMANCE  AND  REACTION 

speak,  of  the  same  parish  ;  most  of  them  met 
often  around  the  same  table !  The  lesson  of 
their  variety  of  experience  and  differences  of 
gifts  as  workmen  in  that  great  palace  of  litera 
ture  which  is  so  variously  built,  is  that  no  action 
and  reaction  in  the  imaginative  world  is  ever 
final.  Least  of  all  do  these  actions  and  reactions 
affect  the  fortunes  of  true  romance.  The  born 
dreamer  may  fall  from  one  dream  into  another, 
but  he  still  murmurs,  in  the  famous  line  of 
William  Ellery  Channing,  — 

"  If  my  bark  sinks,  't  is  to  another  sea." 

No  line  in  our  literature  is  more  truly  Ameri 
can, —  unless  it  be  that  other  splendid  meta 
phor,  by  David  Wasson,  which  says  the  same 
thing  in  other  words  :  — 

"  Life's  gift  outruns  my  fancies  far, 
And  drowns  the  dream 
In  larger  stream, 
As  morning  drinks  the  morning-star." 


V 
Humor  and  Satire 

A  DISTINGUISHED  professor  in  the  Harvard 
Divinity  School  once  began  a  lecture  on  Com 
edy  by  saying  that  the  study  of  the  comic  had 
made  him  realize  for  the  first  time  that  a  joke 
was  one  of  the  most  solemn  things  in  the  world. 
The  analysis  of  humor  is  no  easy  matter.  It  is 
hard  to  say  which  is  the  more  dreary  :  an  es 
say  on  humor  illustrated  by  a  series  of  jokes, 
or  an  exposition  of  humor  in  the  technical 
terms  of  philosophy.  No  subject  has  been  more 
constantly  discussed.  But  it  remains  difficult  to 
decide  what  humor  is.  It  is  easier  to  declare 
what  seemed  humorous  to  our  ancestors,  or 
what  seems  humorous  to  us  to-day.  For  humor 
is  a  shifting  thing.  The  well-known  collections 
of  the  writings  of  American  humorists  surprise 
us  by  their  revelation  of  the  changes  in  public 
taste.  Humor  —  or  the  sense  of  humor - 
alters  while  we  are  watching.  What  seemed  a 
[  166] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

good  joke  to  us  yesterday  seems  but  a  poor 
joke  to-day.  And  yet  it  is  the  same  joke  ! 
What  is  true  of  the  individual  is  all  the  more 
true  of  the  national  sense  of  humor.  This  vast 
series  of  kaleidoscopic  changes  which  we  call 
America  ;  has  it  produced  a  humor  of  its  own  ? 

Let  us  avoid  for  the  moment  the  treacher 
ous  territory  of  definitions.  Let  us,  rather,  take 
one  concrete  example :  a  pair  of  men,  a  knight 
and  his  squire,  who  for  three  hundred  years 
have  ridden  together  down  the  broad  highway 
of  the  world's  imagination.  Everybody  sees 
that  Don  Quixote  and  Sancho  Panza  are  hu 
morous.  Define  them  as  you  will  —  idealist 
and  realist,  knight  and  commoner,  dreamer 
and  proverb-maker  —  these  figures  represent 
to  all  the  world  two  poles  of  human  experi 
ence.  A  Frenchman  once  said  that  all  of  us  are 
Don  Quixotes  on  one  day  and  Sancho  Panzas 
on  the  next.  Humor  springs  from  this  con 
trast.  It  is  the  electric  flash  between  the  two 
poles  of  experience. 

Most  philosophers  who  have  meditated 
upon  the  nature  of  the  comic  point  out  that  it 
is  closely  allied  with  the  tragic.  Flaubert  once 
compared  our  human  idealism  to  the  flight  of 


T  THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

a  swallow;  at  one  moment  it  is  soaring  toward 
the  sunset,  at  the  next  moment  some  one 
shoots  it  and  it  tumbles  into  the  mud  with 
blood  upon  its  glistening  wings.  The  sudden 
poignant  contrast  between  light,  space,  free 
dom,  and  the  wounded  bleeding  bird  in  the 
mud,  is  of  the  very  essence  of  tragedy.  But 
something  like  that  is  always  happening  in  com 
edy.  There  is  the  same  element  of  incongruity, 
without  the  tragic  consequence.  It  is  only  the 
>,  humorist  who  sees  things  truly  because  he  sees 
both  the  greatness  and  the  littleness  of  mor 
tals;  but  even  he  may  not  know  whether  to 
laugh  or  to  cry  at  what  he  sees.  Those  colli 
sions  and  contrasts  out  of  which  the  stuff  of 
tragedy  is  woven,  such  as  the  clash  between  the 
higher  and  lower  nature  of  a  man,  between  his 
past  and  his  present,  between  one's  duties  to 
himself  and  to  his  family  or  the  state,  between, 
in  a  word,  his  character  and  his  situation,  are 
all  illustrated  in  comedy  as  completely  as  in 
tragedy.  The  countryman  in  the  city,  the  city 
man  in  the  country,  is  in  a  comic  situation. 
Here  is  a  coward  named  Falstaff,  and  Shake-, 
speare  puts  him  into  battle.  Here  is  a  vain  per 
son,  and  Malvolio  is  imprisoned  and  twitted  by 
[  '68  ] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

a  clown.  Here  is  an  ignoramus,  and  Dogberry 
is  placed  on  thejudge's  bench.  These  contrasts 
might,  indeed,  be  tragic  enough,  but  they  are 
actually  comic.  Such  characters  are  not  ruled 
by  fate  but  by  a  sportive  chance.  The  gods 
connive  at  them.  They  are  ruled,  like  tragic 
characters,  by  necessity  and  blindness  ;  but  the 
blindness,  instead  of  leading  to  tragic  ruin, 
leads  only  to  being  caught  as  in  some  harmless 
game  of  blind-man's-buff.  There  is  retribution, 
but  Falstaff  is  only  pinched  by  the  fairies.  Com 
edy  of  intrigue  and  comedy  of  character  lead 
to  no  real  catastrophe.  The  end  of  it  on  the 
stage  is  not  death  but  matrimony  ;  and  "  home 
well  pleased  we  go." 

A  thousand  definitions  of  humor  lay  stress 
upon  this  element  of  incongruity.  Hazlitt  be 
gins  his  illuminating  lectures  on  the  Comic 
Writers  by  declaring,  "Man  is  the  only  ani 
mal  that  laughs  or  weeps;  for  he  is  the  only 
animal  that  is  struck  with  the  difference  between 
what  things  are  and  what  they  ought  to  be." 
James  Russell  Lowell  took  the  same  ground. 
"  Humor,"  he  said  once,  "  lies  in  the  contrast 
of  two  ideas.  It  is  the  universal  disenchanter. 
It  is  the  sense  of  comic  contradiction  which 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

arises  from  the  perpetual  comment  which  the 
understanding  makes  upon  the  impressions  re 
ceived  through  the  imagination."  If  that  sen 
tence  seems  too  abstract,  all  we  need  do  is  to 
think  of  Sancho  Panza,  the  man  of  understand 
ing,  talking  about  Don  Quixote,  the  man  of 
imagination. 

We  must  not  multiply  quotations,  but  it  is 
impossible  not  to  remember  the  distinction 
made  by  Carlyle  in  writing  about  Richter. 
"  True  humor,"  says  Carlyle,  "  springs  not 
more  from  the  head  than  from  the  heart.  It  is 
not  contempt ;  its  essence  is  love."  In  other 
words,  not  merely  the  great  humorists  of  the 
world's  literature  —  Cervantes,  Rabelais,  Field 
ing,  Thackeray,  Dickens — but  the  writers  of 
comic  paragraphs  for  to-morrow's  newspaper, 
all  regard  our  human  incongruities  with  a  sort 
of  affection.  The  comic  spirit  is  essentially  a 
social  spirit.  The  great  figures  of  tragedy  are 
solitary.  The  immortal  figures  of  comedy  be 
long  to  a  social  group. 

No  recent  discussion  of  humor  is  more  il 
luminating  and  more  directly  applicable  to  the 
conditions  of  American  life  than  that  of  the 
contemporary  French  philosopher  Bergson. 

[  170] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

Bergson  insists  throughout  his  brilliant  little 
book  on  Laughter  that  laughter  is  a  social  func 
tion.  Life  demands  elasticity.  Hence  whatever 
is  stiff,  automatic,  machine-like,  excites  a  smile. 
We  laugh  when  a  person  gives  us  the  impression 
of  being  a  thing,  —  a  sort  of  mechanical  toy. 
Every  inadaptation  of  the  individual  to  society 
is  potentially  comic.  Thus  laughter  becomes 
a  social  initiation.  It  is  a  kind  of  hazing  which 
we  visit  upon  one  another.  But  we  do  not  iso 
late  the  comic  personage  as  we  do  the  solitary, 
tragic  figure.  The  comic  personage  is  usually 
a  type ;  he  is  one  of  an  absurd  group;  he  is  a 
miser,  a  pedant,  a  pretentious  person,  a  doctor 
or  a  lawyer  in  whom  the  professional  traits 
have  become  automatic  so  that  he  thinks  more 
of  his  professional  behavior  than  he  does  of 
human  health  and  human  justice.  Of  all  these 
separatist  tendencies,  laughter  is  the  great  cor 
rective.  When  the  individual  becomes  set  in 
his  ways,  obstinate,  preoccupied,  automatic, 
the  rest  of  us  laugh  him  out  of  it  if  we  can. 
Of  course  all  that  we  are  thinking  about  at 
the  moment  is  his  ridiculousness.  But  never 
theless,  by  laughing  we  become  the  saviors  of 
society. 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

No  one,  I  think,  can  help  observing  that 
this  conception  of  humor  as  incongruity  is  par 
ticularly  applicable  to  a  new  country.  On  the 
new  soil  and  under  the  new  sky,  in  new  social 
groupings,  all  the  fundamental  contrasts  and 
absurdities  of  our  human  society  assume  a  new 
value.  We  see  them  under  a  fresh  light.  They 
are  differently  focussed.  The  broad  humors 
of  the  camp,  its  swift  and  picturesque  play  of 
light  and  shade,  its  farce  and  caricature  no  less 
than  its  atmosphere  of  comradeship,  of  senti 
ment,  and  of  daring,  are  all  transferred  to  the 
humor  of  the  newly  settled  country.  The  very 
word  "humor"  once  meant  singularity  of  char 
acter,  "some  extravagant  habit,  passion,  or  af 
fection,"  says  Dryden,  "particular  to  some  one 
person."  Every  newly  opened  country  en 
courages,  for  a  while,  this  oddness  and  incon 
gruity  of  individual  character.  It  fosters  it, 
and  at  the  same  moment  it  laughs  at  it.  It  de 
cides  that  such  characters  are  "  humorous."  As 
the  social  conditions  of  such  a  country  change, 
the  old  pioneer  instinct  for  humor,  and  the 
pioneer  forms  of  humor,  may  endure,  though 
the  actual  frontier  may  have  moved  far  westward. 

There    is    another    conception    of  humor 

[ 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

scarcely  less  famous  than  the  notion  of  incon 
gruity.  It  is  the  conception  associated  with  the 
name  of  the  English  philosopher  Hobbes,  who  .*•. 
thought  that  humor  turned  upon  a  sense  of 
superiority.  "  The  passion  of  laughter/'  said 
Hobbes,  "is  nothing  else  but  sudden  glory 
arising  from  some  sudden  conception  of  some 
eminency  in  ourselves  by  comparison  with  the 
inferiority  of  others,  or  with  our  own  formerly." 
Too  cynical  a  view,  declare  many  critics,  but 
they  usually  end  by  admitting  that  there  is  a 
good  deal  in  it  after  all.  I  am  inclined  to  think 
that  Hobbes's  famous  definition  is  more  ap 
plicable  to  wit  than  it  is  to  humor.  Wit  is  more 
purely  intellectual  than  humor.  It  rejoices  in 
its  little  triumphs.  It  requires,  as  has  been  re 
marked,  a  good  head,  while  humor  takes  a 
good  heart,  and  fun  good  spirits.  If  you  take 
Carlyle  literally  when  he  says  that  humor  is 
love,  you  cannot  wholly  share  Hobbes's  con 
viction  that  laughter  turns  upon  a  sense  of 
superiority,  and  yet  surely  we  all  experience  a 
sense  of  kindly  amusement  which  turns  upon 
the  fact  that  we,  the  initiated,  are  superior,  for 
the  moment,  to  the  unlucky  person  who  is  just 
having  his  turn  in  being  hazed.  It  may  be  the 

[  173  ]   - 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

play  of  intellect  or  the  coarser  play  of  animal 
spirits.  One  might  venture  to  make  a  distinc 
tion  between  the  low  comedy  of  the  Latin  races 
and  the  low  comedy  of  the  Germanic  races 
by  pointing  out  that  the  superiority  in  the 
Latin  comedy  usually  turns  upon  quicker  wits, 
whereas  the  superiority  in  the  Germanic  farce 
is  likely  to  turn  upon  stouter  muscles.  But 
whether  it  be  a  play  of  wits  or  of  actual  cud 
gelling,  the  element  of  superiority  and  inferi 
ority  is  almost  always  there. 

I  remember  that  some  German,  I  dare  say 
in  a  forgotten  lecture-room,  once  illustrated  the 
humor  of  superiority  in  this  way.  A  company 
of  strolling  players  sets  up  its  tent  in  a  coun 
try  village.  On  the  front  seat  is  a  peasant, 
laughing  at  the  antics  of  the  clown.  The  peas 
ant  flatters  himself  that  he  sees  through  those 
practical  jokes  on  the  stage;  the  clown  ought 
to  have  seen  that  he  was  about  to  be  tripped 
up,  but  he  was  too  stupid.  But  the  peasant 
saw  that  it  was  coming  all  the  time.  He  laughs 
accordingly.  Just  behind  the  peasant  sits  the 
village  shopkeeper.  He  has  watched  stage 
clowns  many  a  time  and  he  laughs,  not  at  the 
humor  of  the  farce,  but  at  the  naive  laughter 

[  174] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

of  the  peasant  in  front  of  him.  He,  the  shop 
keeper,  is  superior  to  such  broad  and  obvious 
humor  as  that.  Behind  the  shopkeeper  sits  the 
schoolmaster.  The  schoolmaster  is  a  pedant ; 
he  has  probably  lectured  to  his  boys  on  the 
theory  of  humor,  and  he  smiles  in  turn  at  the 
smile  of  superiority  on  the  face  of  the  shop 
keeper.  Well,  peeping  in  at  the  door  of  the  tent 
is  a  man  of  the  world,  who  glances  at  the  clown, 
then  at  the  peasant,  then  at  the  shop-keeper, 
then  at  the  schoolmaster,  each  one  of  whom 
is  laughing  at  the  others,  and  the  man  of  the 
world  laughs  at  them  all !  • 

Let  us  take  an  even  simpler  illustration.  We 
all  know  the  comfortable  sense  of  proprietor 
ship  which  we  experience  after  a  few  days'  so 
journ  at  a  summer  hotel.  We  know  our  place 
at  the  table  ;  we  call  the  head  waiter  by  his  first 
name  ;  we  are  not  even  afraid  of  the  clerk.  Now 
into  this  hotel,  where  we  sit  throned  in  con 
scious  superiority,  comes  a  new  arrival.  He  has 
not  yet  learned  the  exits  and  entrances.  He 
starts  for  the  kitchen  door  inadvertently  when 
he  should  be  headed  for  the  drawing-room. 
We  smile  at  him.  Why  ?  Precisely  because 
that  was  what  we  did  on  the  morning  of  our 

[  175] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

own  arrival.  We  have  been  initiated,  and  it  is 
now  his  turn. 

If  it  is  true  that  a  newly  settled  country 
offers  endless  opportunities  for  the  humor 
which  turns  upon  incongruity,  it  is  also  true 
that  the  new  country  offers  countless  occasions 
for  the  humor  which  turns  upon  the  sudden 
glory  of  superiority.  The  backwoodsman  is 
amusing  to  the  man  of  the  settlements,  and  the 
backwoodsman,  in  turn,  gets  his  full  share  of 
amusement  out  of  watching  the  "  tenderfoot " 
in  the  woods.  It  is  simply  the  case  of  the  old 
resident  versus  thue  newcomer.  The  superior 
ity  need  be  in  no  sense  a  cruel  or  taunting  su 
periority,  although  it  often  happens  to  be  so. 
The  humor  of  the  pioneers  is  not  very  deli 
cately  polished.  The  joke  of  the  frontier  tavern 
or  grocery  store  is  not  always  adapted  to  a 
drawing-room  audience,  but  it  turns  in  a  sur 
prisingly  large  number  of  instances  upon  ex 
actly  the  same  intellectual  or  social  superiority 
which  gives  point  to  the  bon  mots  of  the  most 
cultivated  and  artificial  society  in  the  world. 

The  humor  arising  from  incongruity,  then, 
and  the  humor  arising  from  a  sense  of  supe 
riority,  are  both  of  them  social  in  their  nature. 

[  176] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

No  less  social,  surely,  is  the  function  of  satire. 
It  is  possible  that  satire  may  be  decaying,  that 
it  is  becoming,  if  it  has  not  already  become,  a 
mere  splendid  or  odious  tradition.  But  let  us 
call  it  a  great  tradition  and,  upon  the  whole,  a 
splendid  one.  Even  when  debased  to  purely 
party  or  personal  uses,  the  verse  satire  of  a 
Dryden  retains  its  magnificent  resonance  ;  "  the 
ring,'*  says  Saintsbury,  "  as  of  a  great  bronze 
coin  thrown  down  on  marble. "  The  malignant 
couplets  of  an  Alexander  Pope  still  gleam  like 
malevolent  jewels  through  the  dust  of  two  hun 
dred  years.  The  cynicism,  the  misanthropy, 
the  mere  adolescent  badness  of  Byron  are  pow 
erless  to  clip  the  wings  of  the  wide-ranging,  far- 
darting  wit  and  humor  and  irony  of  Don  Juan. 
The  homely  Yankee  dialect,  the  provinciality, 
the  "  gnarly  "  flavor  of  the  Biglow  Papers  do 
not  prevent  our  finding  in  that  pungent  and 
resplendent  satire  the  powers  of  Lowell  at  full 
play;  and, what  is  more  than  that, the  epitome 
of  the  American  spirit  in  a  moral  crisis. 

I  take  the  names  of  those  four  satirists,  Dry- 
den,  Pope,  Byron, and  Lowell, quiteat  random; 
but  they  serve  to  illustrate  a  significant  principle; 
namely,  that  great  satire  becomes  ennobled  as 

[  177] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

it  touches  communal,  not  merely  individual 
interests,  as  it  voices  social  and  not  merely  in 
dividual  ideals.  Those  four  modern  satirists 
were  steeped  in  the  nationalistic  political  poetry 
of  the  OldTestament.  They  were  familiar  with 
its  war  anthems,  dirges,  and  prophecies,  its  con 
cern  for  the  prosperity  and  adversity,  the  sin 
and  the  punishment,  of  a  people.  Here  the 
writers  of  the  Golden  Age  of  English  satire 
found  their  vocabulary  and  phrase-book,  their 
grammar  of  politics  and  history,  their  models 
of  good  and  evil,  kings ;  and  in  that  Biblical 
school  of  political  poetry,  which  has  affected  our 
literature  from  the  Reformation  down  to  Mr. 
Kipling,  there  has  always  been  a  class  in  satire ! 
The  satirical  portraits,  satirical  lyrics,  satirical 
parables  of  the  Old  Testament  prophets  are 
only  less  noteworthy  than  their  audacity  in 
striking  high  and  hard.  Their  foes  were  the  all- 
powerful  :  Babylon  and  Assyria  and  Egypt 
loom  vast  and  terrible  upon  the  canvases  of 
Isaiah  and  Ezekiel ;  and  poets  of  a  later  time 
have  learned  there  the  secrets  of  social  and  po 
litical  idealism,  and  the  signs  of  national  doom. 
There  are  two  familiar  types  of  satire  asso 
ciated  with  the  names  of  Horace  and  Juvenal. 

[  '78  ] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

Both  types  are  abundantly  illustrated  in  Eng 
lish  and  American  literature.  When  you  meet 
a  bore  or  a  hypocrite  or  a  plain  rascal,  is  it  bet 
ter  to  chastise  him  with  laughter  or  to  flay  him 
with  shining  fury  ?  I  shall  take  both  horns  of  the 
dilemma  and  assert  that  both  methods  are  ad- 
mirableand socially  useful.  The  minor  English 
and  American  poets  of  the  seventeenth  and 
eighteenth  centuries  were  neverweary  of  speak 
ing  of  satire  as  a  terrific  weapon  which  they 
were  forced  to  wield  as  saviors  of  society.  But 
whether  they  belonged  to  the  urbane  school  of 
Horace,  or  to  the  severely  moralistic  school  of 
Juvenal,  they  soon  found  themselves  falling 
into  one  or  the  other  of  two  modes  of  writing. 
They  addressed  either  the  little  audience  or  the 
big  audience,  and  they  modified  their  styles  ac 
cordingly.  The  great  satirists  of  the  Renais 
sance,  for  example,  like  More,  Erasmus,  and 
Rabelais,  wrote  simply  for  the  persons  who 
were  qualified  to  understand  them.  More  and 
Erasmus  wrote  their  immortal  satires  in  Latin. 
By  so  doing  they  addressed  themselves  to 
cultivated  Europe.  They  ran  no  risk  of  being 
misunderstood  by  persons  for  whom  the  joke 
was  not  intended.  All  readers  of  Latin  were 

[   '79  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

like  members  of  one  club.  Of  course  member 
ship  was  restricted  to  the  learned,  but  had  not 
Horace  talked  about  being  content  with  a  few 
readers,  and  was  not  Voltaire  coming  by  and  by 
with  the  advice  to  try  for  the  "little  public"? 

The  typical  wit  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
whether  in  London,  Paris,  or  in  Franklin's 
printing-shop  in  Philadelphia,  had,  of  course, 
abandoned  Latin.  But  it  still  addressed  itself 
to  the  "  little  public,"  to  the  persons  who  were 
qualified  to  understand.  The  circulation  of  the 
Spectator •,  which  represents  so  perfectly  the  wit, 
humor,  and  satire  of  the  early  eighteenth  cen 
tury  in  England,  was  only  about  ten  thousand 
copies.  This  limited  audience  smiled  at  the  ur 
bane  delicate  touches  of  Mr.  Steele  and  Mr. 
Addison.  They  understood  the  allusions.  The 
fable  concerned  them  and  not  the  outsiders.  It 
was  something  like  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes 
reading  his  witty  and  satirical  couplets  to  an 
audience  of  Harvard  alumni.  The  jokes  are  in 
the  vernacular,  but  in  a  vernacular  as  spoken 
in  a  certain  social  medium.  It  is  all  very  de 
lightful. 

But  there  is  a  very  different  kind  of  audience 
gathering  all  this  while  outside  the  Harvard 
[  180] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

gates.  These  two  publics  for  the  humorist  we 
may  call  the  invited  and  the  uninvited ;  the  in 
ner  circle  and  the  outer  circle :  first,  those  who 
have  tickets  for  the  garden  party,  and  who 
stroll  over  the  lawn,  decorously  gowned  and 
properly  coated,  conversing  with  one  another 
in  the  accepted  social  accents  and  employing 
the  recognized  social  adjectives;  and  second, 
the  crowd  outside  the  gates,  —  curious,  satir 
ical,  good-natured  in  the  main,  straightforward 
of  speech  and  quick  to  applaud  a  ready  wit  or 
a  humor-loving  eye  or  a  telling  phrase  spoken 
straight  from  the  heart  of  the  mob. 

Will  an  author  choose  to  address  the  selected 
guests  or  the  casual  crowd?  Either  way  lies 
fame,  if  one  does  it  well.  Your  uninvited  men 
find  themselves  talking  to  the  uninvited  crowd. 
Before  they  know  it  they  are  famous  too.  They 
are  fashioning  another  manner  of  speech.  Defoe 
is  there,  with  his  saucy  ballads  selling  trium 
phantly  under  his  very  pillory  ;  with  his  'True- 
Born  Englishman  puncturing  forever  the  fiction 
of  the  honorable  ancestry  of  the  English  aris 
tocracy  ;  with  his  Crusoe  and  Moll  Flanders, 
written,  as  Lamb  said  long  afterwards,  for  the 
servant-maid  and  the  sailor.  Swift  is  there, with 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

his  terrific  Drapiers  Letters^  anonymous,  aimed 
at  the  uneducated,  with  cold  fury  bludgeoning 
a  government  into  obedience  ;  with  his  Gulli 
ver's  'Travels,  so  transparent  upon  the  surface 
that  a  child  reads  the  book  with  delight  and 
remains  happily  ignorant  that  it  is  a  satire  upon 
humanity.  And  then,  into  the  London  of  Defoe 
and  Swift,and  into  the  very  centre  of  the  middle- 
class  mob,  steps,  in  1724,  the  bland  Benjamin 
Franklin  in  search  of  a  style  "  smooth,  clear, 
and  short,"  and  for  half  a  century,  with  con 
summate  skill,  shapes  that  style  to  his  audience. 
His  young  friend  Thomas  Paine  takes  the  style 
and  touches  it  with  passion,  until  he  becomes 
the  perfect  pamphleteer,  and  his  Crisis  is  v/orth 
as  much  to  our  Revolution  —  men  said  —  as 
the  sword  of  Washington.  After  another  gen 
eration  the  gaunt  Lincoln,  speaking  that  same 
plain  prose  of  Defoe,  Swift,  Franklin,  and  Paine, 
—  Lincoln  who  began  his  first  Douglas  debate, 
not  like  his  cultivated  opponent  with  the  con 
ventional  "  Ladies  and  Gentlemen,"  but  with 
the  ominously  intimate, "  My  Fellow  Citizens,'* 
-  Lincoln  is  saying,  "  I  am  not  master  of  lan 
guage;  I  have  not  a  fine  education;  I  am  not 
capable  of  entering  into  a  disquisition  upon  dia- 
[  '82] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

lectics,  as  I  believe  you  call  it;  but  I  do  not 
believe  the  language  I  employed  bears  any  such 
construction  as  Judge  Douglas  puts  upon  it. 
But  I  don't  care  about  a  quibble  in  regard  to 
words.  I  know  what  I  meant,  and  /  will  not 
leave  this  crowd  in  doubt,  if  I  can  explain  it  to 
them,  what  I  really  meant  in  the  use  of  that 
paragraph." 

"/  will  not  leave  this  crowd  in  doubt "  ;  that  is 
the  final  accent  of  our  spoken  prose,  the  prose 
addressed  to  one's  fellow  citizens,  to  the  great 
public.  This  is  the  prose  spoken  in  the  humor 
and  satire  of  Dickens.  Dressed  in  a  queer  dia 
lect,  and  put  into  satirical  verse,  it  is  the  lan 
guage  of  the  Biglow  Papers.  Uttered  with  the 
accent  of  a  Chicago  Irishman,  it  is  the  prose 
admired  by  millions  of  the  countrymen  of 
"Mr  Dooley." 

Satire  written  to  the  "  little  public  "  tends 
toward  the  social  type ;  that  written  to  the 
"  great  public  "  to  the  political  type.  It  is  ob 
vious  that  just  as  a  newly  settled  country  offers 
constant  opportunity  for  the  humor  of  incon 
gruity  and  the  humor  arising  from  a  sense  of 
superiority,  it  likewise  affords  a  daily  stimulus 
to  the  use  of  satire.  That  moralizing  Puritan 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

strain  of  censure  which  lost  none  of  its  harsh 
ness  in  crossing  the  Atlantic  Ocean  found  full 
play  in  the  colonial  satire  of  the  seventeenth 
and  eighteenth  centuries.  As  the  topics  for  sat 
ire  grew  wider  and  more  political  in  their  scope, 
the  audiences  increased.  To-day  the  very  old 
est  issues  of  the  common  life  of  that  queer 
"  political  animal  "  named  man  are  discussed 
by  our  popular  newspaper  satirists  in  the  pre 
sence  of  a  democratic  audience  that  stretches 
from  the  Atlantic  to  the  Pacific. 

Is  there,  then,  a  distinctly  American  type  of 
humor  and  satire  ?  I  think  it  would  be  difficult 
to  prove  that  our  composite  American  nation 
ality  has  developed  a  mode  of  humor  and  sat 
ire  which  is  racially  different  from  the  humor 
and  satire  of  the  Old  World.  All  racial  lines 
in  literature  are  extremely  difficult  to  draw.  If 
you  attempt  to  analyze  English  humor,  you 
find  that  it  is  mostly  Scotch  or  Irish.  If  you 
put  Scotch  and  Irish  humor  under  the  micro 
scope,  you  discover  that  most  of  the  best 
Scotch  and  Irish  jokes  are  as  old  as  the  Greeks 
and  the  Egyptians.  You  pick  up  a  copy  of 
Fliegende  Blatter  and  you  get  keen  amusement 
from  its  revelation  of  German  humor.  But  how 

[  184] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

much  of  this  humor,  after  all,  is  either  essen 
tially  universal  in  its  scope  or  else  a  matter  of 
mere  stage-setting  and  machinery  ?  Without 
the  Prussian  lieutenant  the  Fliegende  Blatter 
would  lose  half  its  point;  nor  can  one  imagine 
a  Punch  without  a  picture  of  the  English  po 
liceman.  The  lieutenant  and  the  policeman, 
however,  are  a  part  of  the  accepted  social  furni 
ture  of  the  two  countries.  They  belong  to  the 
decorative  background  of  the  social  drama. 
They  heighten  the  effectiveness  of  local  humor, 
but  it  may  be  questioned  whether  they  afford 
any  evidence  of  genuine  racial  differentiation  as 
to  the  sense  of  the  comic. 

What  one  can  abundantly  prove,  however, 
is  that  the  United  States  afford  a  new  national 
field  for  certain  types  of  humor  and  satire.  Our 
English  friends  are  never  weary  of  writing  mag 
azine  articles  about  Yankee  humor,  in  which 
they  explain  the  peculiarities  of  the  American 
joke  with  a  dogmatism  which  has  sometimes 
been  thought  to  prove  that  there  is  such  a 
thing  as  national  lack  of  humor,  whether  there 
be  such  a  thing  as  national  humor  or  not.  One 
such  article,  I  remember,  endeavored  to  prove 
that  the  exaggeration  often  found  in  American 

[  '85  j 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

humor  was  due  to  the  vastness  of  the  Amer 
ican  continent.  Our  geography,  that  is  to  say, 
is  too  much  for  the  Yankee  brain.  Mr.  Bir- 
4-  rell,  an  expert  judge  of  humor,  surely,  thinks 
that  the  characteristic  of  American  humor  lies 
in  its  habit  of  speaking  of  something  hideous 
in  a  tone  of  levity.  Many  Englishmen,  in  fact, 
have  been  as  much  impressed  with  this  min 
imizing  trick  of  American  humor  as  with  the 
converse  trick  of  magnifying.  Upon  the  Con 
tinent  the  characteristic  trait  of  American 
humor  has  often  been  thought  to  be  its  ex 
uberance  of  phrase.  Many  shrewd  judges  of 
our  newspaper  humor  have  pointed  out  that 
one  of  its  most  favorite  methods  is  the  sup 
pression  of  one  link  in  the  chain  of  logical 
reasoning.  Such  generalizations  as  these  are 
always  interesting,  although  they  may  not  take 
us  very  far. 

Yet  it  is  clear  that  certain  types  of  humor 
and  satire  have  proved  to  be  specially  adapted 
to  the  American  soil  and  climate.  Whether  or 
not  these  types  are  truly  indigenous  one  may 
hesitate  to  say,  yet  it  remains  true  that  the  well- 
known  conditions  of  American  life  have  stim 
ulated  certain  varieties  of  humor  into  such  a 
[  186] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

richness  of  manifestation  as  the  Old  World  can 
scarcely  show. 

Curiously  enough,  one  of  the  most  perfected 
types  of  American  humor  is  that  urbane  Ho- 
ratian  variety  which  has  often  been  held  to  be 
the  exclusive  possession  of  the  cultivated  and 
restricted  societies  of  older  civilization.  Yet  it 
is  precisely  this  kind  of  humor  which  has  been 
the  delight  of  some  of  the  most  typical  Amer 
ican  minds.  Benjamin  Franklin,  for  example, 
modelled  his  style  and  his  sense  of  the  humor 
ous  on  the  papers  of  the  Spectator.  He  pro 
duced  humorous  fables  and  apologues,  choice 
little  morsels  of  social  and  political  persiflage, 
which  were  perfectly  suited,  not  merely  to  the 
taste  of  London  in  the  so-called  golden  age  of 
English  satire,  but  to  the  tone  of  the  wittiest 
salons  of  Paris  in  the  age  when  the  old  regime 
went  tottering,  talking,  quoting,  jesting  to  its 
fall.  Read  Franklin's  charming  and  wise  let 
ter  to  Madame  Brillon  about  giving  too  much 
for  the  whistle.  It  is  the  perfection  of  well- 
bred  humor;  a  humor  very  American,  very 
Franklinian,  although  its  theme  and  tone  and 
phrasing  might  well  have  been  envied  by  Hor 
ace  or  Voltaire. 

[  187] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

The  gentle  humor  of  Irving  is  marked  by 
precisely  those  traits  of  urbanity  and  restraint 
which  characterize  the  parables  of  Franklin. 
Does  not  the  Autocrat  of  the  Breakfast  ¥able 
itself  presuppose  the  existence  of  a  truly  culti 
vated  society?  Its  tone — "As  I  was  saying 
when  I  was  interrupted  " —  is  the  tone  of  the  in 
timate  circle.  There  was  so  much  genuine  hu 
manity  in  the  gay  little  doctor  that  persons  born 
outside  the  circle  of  Harvard  College  and  the 
North  Shore  and  Boston  felt  themselves  at  once 
initiated  by  the  touch  of  his  merry  wand  into 
a  humanized,  kindly  theory  of  life.  The  hu 
mor  of  George  William  Curtis  had  a  similarly 
mellow  and  ripened  quality.  It  is  a  curious 
comment  upon  that  theory  of  Americans  which 
represents  us  primarily  as  a  loud-voiced,  as 
sertive,  headstrong  people,  to  be  thus  made 
aware  that  many  of  the  humorists  whom  we 
have  loved  best  are  precisely  those  whose  writ 
ing  has  been  marked  by  the  most  delicate  re 
straint,  whose  theory  of  life  has  been  the  most 
highly  urbane  and  civi4ized,  whose  work  is  in 
distinguishable  in  tone  —  though  its  materials 
are  so  different  —  from  that  of  other  humorous 
writers  on  the  other  side  of  the  Atlantic.  On 
[  '88  ] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

its  social  side  all  this  is  a  fresh  proof  of  the  ex 
traordinary  adaptability  of  the  American  mind. 
On  the  literary  side  it  is  one  more  evidence 
of  the  national  fondness  for  neatness  and  per 
fection  of  workmanship. 

But  we  are  something  other  than  a  nation  of 
mere  lovers  and  would-be  imitators  of  Charles 
Lamb.  The  moralistic  type  of  humor,  the  crack 
of  Juvenal's  whip,  as  well  as  the  delicate  Ho- 
ratian  playing  around  the  heart-strings,  has 
characterized  our  humor  and  satire  from  the 
beginning.  At  bottom  the  American  is  serious. 
t  Beneath  the  surface  of  his  jokes  there  is  moral 
^earnestness,  there  is  ethical  passion  y  Take,  for 
example,  some  of  the  apothegms  of  "Josh 
Billings."  He  failed  with  the  public  until  he 
took  up  the  trick  of  misspelling  his  words. 
When  he  had  once  gained  his  public  he  some 
times  delighted  them  with  sheer  whimsical  in 
congruity,  like  this  :  — 

"  There  iz  2  things  in  this  life  for  which  we 
are  never  fully  prepared,  and  that  iz  twins." 

But  more  often  the  tone  is  really  grave.  It 
is  only  the  spelling  that  is  queer.  The  moral 
izing  might  be  by  La  Bruyere  or  La  Roche 
foucauld.  Take  this :  — 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

"  Life  iz  short,  but  it  iz  long  enuff  to  ruin 
enny  man  who  wants  tew  be  ruined." 

Or  this:  — 

"  When  a  feller  gits  a  goin  doun  hill,  it  dus 
seem  as  tho  evry  thing  had  bin  greased  for  the 
okashun."  That  is  what  writers  of  tragedy 
have  been  showing,  ever  since  the  Greeks ! 

Or  finally,  this,  which  has  the  perfect  tone 
of  the  great  French  moralists  :  — 

"It  iz  a  verry  delicate  job  to  forgive  a  man 
without  lowering  him  in  his  own  estimashun, 
and  yures  too." 

See  how  the  moralistic  note  is  struck  in  the 
field  of  political  satire.  It  is  1866,  and  "Pe 
troleum  V.  Nasby,"  writing  from  "  Confedrit 
X  Roads/'  Kentucky,  gives  Deekin  Pogram's 
views  on  education.  "  He  did  n't  bleeve  in 
edjucashun,  generally  speekin.  The  common 
people  was  better  off  without  it,  ez  edjucashun 
hed  a  tendency  to  unsettle  their  minds.  He 
had  seen  the  evil  effex  ov  it  in  niggers  and  poor 
whites.  So  soon  ez  a  nigger  masters  the  spellin 
book  and  gits  into  noosepapers,  he  becomes 
dissatisfied  with  his  condishin,  and  hankers 
after  a  better  cabin  and  more  wages.  He  to- 
wunst  begins  to  insist  onto  ownin  land  hisself, 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

and  givin  his  children  edjucashun,and,ez  a  nig 
ger,  for  our  purposes,  aint  worth  a  soo  markee." 

The  single  phrase,  "  ez  a  nigger,"  spells 
a  whole  chapter  of  American  history. 

That  quotation  from  "Petroleum  V.  Nasby  " 
serves  also  to  illustrate  a  species  of  American 
humor  which  has  been  of  immense  historical 
importance  and  which  has  never  been  more 
active  than  it  is  to-day  :  the  humor,  namely,  of 
local,  provincial,  and  sectional  types.  Much  of 
this  falls  under  Bergson's  conception  of  humor 
as  social  censure.  It  rebukes  the  extravagance, 
the  rigidity,  the  unawareness  of  the  individual 
who  fails  to  adapt  himself  to  his  social  environ 
ment.  It  takes  the  place,  in  our  categories  of 
humor,  of  those  types  of  class  humor  and 
satire  in  which  European  literature  is  so  rich. 
The  mobility  of  our  population,  the  constant 
shifting  of  professions  and  callings,  has  pre 
vented  our  developing  fixed  class  types  of 
humor.  We  have  not  even  the  lieutenant  or 
the  policeman  as  permanent  members  of  our 
humorous  stock  company.  The  policeman  of 
to-day  may  be  mayor  or  governor  to-morrow. 
The  lieutenant  may  go  back  to  his  grocery 
wagon  or  on  to  his  department  store.  But 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

whenever  and  wherever  such  an  individual  fails 
to  adapt  himself  to  his  new  companions,  fails 
to  take  on,  as  it  were,  the  colors  of  his  new 
environment,  to  speak  in  the  new  social  accents, 
to  follow  the  recognized  patterns  of  behavior, 
then  the  kindly  whip  of  the  humorist  is  already 
cracking  round  his  ears.  The  humor  and  sat 
ire  of  college  undergraduate  journalism  turns 
mainly  upon  the  recognized  ability  or  inability 
of  different  individuals  to  adapt  themselves  to 
their  changing  pigeon-holes  in  the  college  or 
ganism.  A  freshman  must  behave  like  a  fresh 
man,  or  he  is  laughed  at.  Yet  he  must  not  be 
have  as  if  he  were  nothing  but  the  automaton 
of  a  freshman,  or  he  will  be  laughed  at  more 
merrily  still. 

One  of  the  first  discoveries  of  our  earlier 
humorists  was  the  Down-East  Yankee.  "  I  'm 
going  to  Portland  whether  or  no,"  says  Major 
Jack  Downing,  telling  the  story  of  his  boy 
hood  ;  "  I  '11  see  what  this  world  is  made  of  yet. 
So  I  tackled  up  the  old  horse  and  packed  in  a 
load  of  ax  handles  and  a  few  notions,  and  mo 
ther  fried  me  a  few  doughnuts  ...  for  I  told 
her  I  did  n't  know  how  long  I  should  begone,'* 
—  and  off  he  goes  to  Portland,  to  see  what  the 

[  192] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

world  is  made  of.  It  is  a  little  like  Defoe,  and 
a  good  deal  like  the  young  Ulysses,  bent  upon 
knowing  cities  and  men  and  upon  getting  the 
best  of  bargains. 

Each  generation  of  Americans  has  known 
something  like  that  trip  to  Portland.  Each 
generation  has  had  to  measure  its  wits,  its  re 
sources,  its  manners,  against  new  standards  of 
comparison.  At  every  stage  of  the  journey 
there  are  mishaps  and  ridiculous  adventures; 
but  everywhere,  likewise,  there  is  zest,  con 
quest,  initiation ;  the  heart  of  a  boy  who cc  wants 
to  know"  —  as  the  Yankees  used  to  say;  or, 
in  more  modern  phrase, — 

"to  admire  and  for  to  see, 
For  to  behold  this  world  so  wide.*' 

There  is  the  same  romance  of  adventure  in 
the  humor  concerning  the  Irishman,  the  Negro, 
the  Dutchman,  the  Dago,  the  farmer.  Each  in 
turn  becomes  humorous  through  failure  to 
adapt  himself  to  the  prevalent  type.  A  long- 
bearded  Jew  is  not  ridiculous  in  Russia,  but  he 
rapidly  becomes  ridiculous  even  on  the  East 
Side  of  New  York.  Underneath  all  this  pop 
ular  humor  of  the  comic  supplements  one  may 
catch  glimpses  of  the  great  revolving  wheels 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

which  are  crushing  the  vast  majority  of  our 
population  into  something  like  uniformity.  It 
is  a  process  of  social  attrition.  The  sharp  edges 
of  individual  behavior  get  rounded  off.  The 
individual  loses  color  and  picturesqueness,  pre 
cisely  as  he  casts  aside  the  national  costume  of 
the  land  from  which  he  came.  His  speech,  his 
gait,  his  demeanor,  become  as  nearly  as  pos 
sible  like  the  speech  and  carriage  of  all  his 
neighbors.  If  he  resists,  he  is  laughed  at;  and  if 
he  does  not  personally  heed  the  laughter,  he 
may  be  sure  that  his  children  do.  It  is  the  child 
ren  of  our  immigrants  who  catch  the  sly  smiles 
of  their  s-chool-fellows,  who  overhear  jokes 
from  the  newspapers  and  on  the  street  corners, 
who  bring  home  to  their  foreign-born  fathers 
and  mothers  the  imperious  childish  demand  to 
make  themselves  like  unto  everybody  else. 

A  similar  social  function  is  performed  by  that 
well-known  mode  of  American  humor  which 
ridicules  the  inhabitants  of  certain  states.  Why 
should  New  Jersey,  for  example,  be  more  ridi 
culous  than  Delaware  ?  In  the  eyes  of  the  news 
paper  paragrapher  it  unquestionably  is,  just  as 
Missouri  has  more  humorous  connotations  than 
Kentucky.  We  may  think  we  understand  why 

[   194  ] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

we  smile  when  a  man  says  that  he  comes  from 
Kalamazoo  or  Oshkosh,  but  the  smile  when  he 
says  "  Philadelphia  "  or  "  Boston  "  or  "  Brook 
lyn  "  is  only  a  trifle  more  subtle.  It  is  none  the 
less  real.  Why  should  the  suburban  dweller  of 
every  city  be  regarded  with  humorous  c^nde- 
scension  by  the  man  who  is  compelled  to  sleep 
within  the  city  limits  ?  No  one  can  say, and  yet 
without  that  humor  of  the  suburbs  the  comic 
supplements  of  American  newspapers  would 
be  infinitely  less  entertaining,  — to  the  people 
who  enjoy  comic  supplements. 

So  it  is  with  the  larger  divisions  of  our  na 
tional  life.  Yankee,  Southerner,  Westerner, 
Californian,  Texan,  each  type  provokes  certain 
connotations  of  humor  when  viewed  by  any  of 
the  other  types.  Each  type  in  turn  has  its  note 
of  provinciality  when  compared  with  the  norm 
of  the  typical  American.  It  is  quite  possible  to 
maintain  that  our  literature,  like  our  social  life, 
has  suffered  by  this  ever-present  American  sense 
of  the  ridiculous.  Our  social  consciousness 
might  be  far  more  various  and  richly  colored, 
there  might  be  more  true  provincial  independ 
ence  of  speech  and  custom  and  imagination  if 
we  had  not  to  reckon  with  this  ever-present  cen- 

C  195] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

sure  of  laughter,  this  fear  of  rinding  ourselves, 
our  city,  our  section,  out  of  touch  with  the  pre 
valent  tone  and  temper  of  the  country  as  a 
whole.  It  is  one  of  the  forfeits  we  are  bound  to 
pay  when  we  play  the  great  absorbing  game  of 
democracy. 

We  are  now  ready  to  ask  once  more  whether 
there  is  a  truly  national  type  of  American  hu 
mor.  Viewed  exclusively  from  the  standpoint 
of  racial  characteristics,  we  have  seen  that  this 
question  as  to  a  national  type  of  humor  is  diffi 
cult  to  answer.  But  we  have  seen  with  equal 
clearness  that  the  United  States  has  offered  a 
singularly  rich  field  for  the  development  of  the 
sense  of  humor  ;  and  furthermore  that  there 
are  certain  specialized  forms  of  humor  which 
have  flourished  luxuriantly  upon  our  soil.  Our 
humorists  have  made  the  most  of  their  native 
materials.  Every  pioneer  trait  of  versatility, 
curiosity,  shrewdness,  has  been  turned  some 
how  to  humorous  account.  The  very  institu 
tions  of  democracy,  moulding  day  by  day  and 
generation  after  generation  the  habits  and  the 
mental  characteristics  of  millions  of  men,  have 
produced  a  social  atmosphere  in  which  humor 
is  one  of  the  most  indisputable  elements. 

[  196] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

I  recall  a  notable  essay  by  Mr.  Charles  John 
ston  on  the  essence  of  American  humor  in  which 
he  applies  to  the  conditions  of  American  life 
one  familiar  distinction  between  humor  and  wit. 
Wit,  he  asserts,  scores  off  the  other  man,  hu 
mor  does  not.  Wit  frequently  turns  upon  tri 
bal  differences,  upon  tribal  vanity.  The  mor 
dant  wit  of  the  Jew,  for  example,  from  the 
literature  of  the  Old  Testament  down  to  the 
raillery  of  Heine,  has  turned  largely  upon  the 
sense  of  racial  superiority,  of  intellectual  and 
moral  differences.  But  true  humor,  Mr.  John 
ston  goes  on  to  argue,  has  always  a  binding,  a 
uniting  quality.  Thus  Huckleberry  Finn  and 
Jim  Hawkins,  white  man  and  black  man,  are 
afloat  together  on  the  Mississippi  River  raft  and 
they  are  made  brethren  by  the  fraternal  quality 
of  Mark  Twain's  humor.  Thus  the  levelling 
quality  of  Bret  Harte's  humor  bridges  social 
and  moral  chasms.  It  creates  an  atmosphere 
of  charity  and  sympathy.  In  fact,  the  typical 
Amrrirrp.  hiimni^  niiTiHinrr  to  the  opinion  of 
Mr.  Johnston,  emphasizes  the  broad  and  hu 
mane  side  of  j)ur  common  nature.  It  reveals 
the  common  souL»It  possesses  a  surplusage  of 
power,  oFbuoyancy  and  of  conquest  over  cir- 

'[  '97  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

cumstances.   It  means  at  its  best  a  humanizing 
of  our  hearts.  « 

Some  people  will  think  that  all  this  is  too 
optimistic,  but  if  you  are  not  optimistic  enough 
you  cannot  keep  up  with  the  facts.  Certain  it 
is  that  the  pioneers  of  American  national  hu 
mor,  the  creators  of  what  we  may  call  the  "all- 
American"  type  of  humor,  have  possessed  pre 
cisely  the  qualities  which  Mr.  Johnston  has 
pointed  out.  They  are  apparent  in  the  pro 
ductions  of  Artemus  Ward.  The  present  gen 
eration  vaguely  remembers  Artemus  Ward  as 
the  man  who  was  willing  to  send  all  his  wife's 
relatives  to  the  war  and  who,  standing  by  the 
tomb  of  Shakespeare,  thought  it  "a  success/' 
But  no  one  who  turns  to  the  almost  forgotten 
pages  of  that  kindly  jester  can  fail  to  be  im 
pressed  by  his  sunny  quality,  by  the  atmosphere 
of  fraternal  affection  which  glorifies  his  queer 
spelling  and  his  somewhat  threadbare  witti 
cisms.  Mark  Twain,  who  is  universally  re 
cognized  by  Europeans  as  a  representative  of 
typical  American  humor,  had  precisely  those 
qualities  of  "pioneer  curiosity,  swift  versatility, 
absolute  democracy,  which  are  characteristic 
of  the  national  temper.  His  lively  accounts  of 

[  198  ] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

frontier  experiences  in  Roughing  //,  his  com 
ments  upon  the  old  world  in  Innocents  Abroad 
and  A  Tramp  Abroad,  his  hatred  of  pretence 
and  injustice,  his  scorn  at  sentimentality  coupled 
with  his  insistence  upon  the  rights  of  sentiment, 
in  a  word  his  persistent  idealism,  make  Mark 
Twain  one  of  the  most  representative  of  Amer 
ican  writers.  Largeness,  freedom,  human  sym 
pathy,  are  revealed  upon^every  page. 

It  is  true  that  the  dangers  of  American  hu 
mor  are  no  less  in  evidence  there.  There  is  the 
danger  of  extravagance,  which  in  Mark  Twain's 
earlier  writings  was  carried  to  lengths  of  ab 
surdity.  There  is  the  old  danger  of  the  profes 
sional  humorist  of  fearing  to  fail  to  score  his 
point,  and  so  of  underscoring  it  with  painful 
reiteration.  Mark  Twain  is  frequently  gro 
tesque.  Sometimes  there  is  evidence  of  imper 
fect  taste,  or  of  bad  taste.  Sometimes  there  is 
actual  vulgarity.  In  his  earlier  books  particu 
larly  there  is  revealed  that  lack  of  discipline 
which  has  been  such  a  constant  accompaniment 
of  American  writing.  Yet  a  native  of  Hanni 
bal,  Missouri,  trained  on  a  river  steamboat  and 
in  a  country  printing-office  and  in  mining- 
camps,  can  scarcely  be  expected  to  exhibit  the 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

finely  balanced  critical  sense  of  a  Matthew  Ar 
nold.  Mark  Twain  was  often  accused  in  the 
first  years  of  his  international  reputation  of  a 
characteristically  American  lack  of  reverence. 
He  is  often  irreverent.  But  here  again  the 
boundaries  of  his  irreverence  are  precisely  those 
which  the  national  instinct  itself  has  drawn. 
The  joke  stops  short  of  certain  topics  which  the 
American  mind  holds  sacred.  We  all  have  our 
favorite  pages  in  the  writings  of  this  versatile 
and  richly  endowed  humorist,  but  I  think  no 
one  can  read  his  description  of  the  coyote  in 
Roughing  It,  and  Huckleberry  Finn's  account 
of  his  first  visit  to  the  circus,  without  realiz 
ing  that  in  this  fresh  revelation  of  immemorial 
human  curiosity,  this  vivid  perception  of  in 
congruity  and  surprise,  this  series  of  lightning- 
like  flashes  from  one  pole  of  experience  to  the 
other,  we  have  not  only  masterpieces  of  world 
humor,  but  a  revelation  of  a  distinctly  Amer 
ican  reaction  to  the  facts  presented  by  univer 
sal  experience. 

The  picturesque  personality  and  the  extra 
ordinarily  successful  career  of  Mark  Twain 
kept  him,  during  the  last  twenty-five  years  of 
his  life,  in  the  focus  of  public  attention.    But 
[  200  ] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

no  one  can  read  the  pages  of  the  older  Amer 
ican  humorists,  —  or  try  to  recall  to  mind  the 
names  of  paragraphers  who  used  to  write  comic 
matter  for  this  or  that  newspaper, — without 
realizing  how  swiftly  the  dust  of  oblivion  set 
tles  upon  all  the  makers  of  mere  jokes.  It  is 
enough,  perhaps,  that  they  caused  a  smile  for 
the  moment.  Even  those  humorists  who  mark 
epochs  in  the  history  of  American  provincial 
and  political  satire,  like  Seba  Smith  with  his 
Major  Jack  Downing,  Newell  with  his  Papers 
of  Orpheus  C.  Kerry  "  Petroleum  V.  Nasby's  " 
Letters  from  the  Confedrit  X  Roads,  Shillaber's 
Mrs.  Par  ting  ton,  —  all  these  have  disappeared 
round  the  turn  of  the  long  road. 

"Hans  Breitman  gife  a  barty  — 
Vhere  ish  dot  barty  now  ? ' ' 

It  seems  as  if  the  conscious  humorists,  the 
professional  funny  writers,  had  the  shortest 
lease  of  literary  life.  They  play  their  little  comic 
parts  before  a  well-disposed  but  restless  audi 
ence  which  is  already  impatiently  waiting  for 
some  other  "turn/*  One  of  them  makes  a  hit 
with  a  song  or  story,  just  as  a  draughtsman  for 
a  Sunday  colored  supplement  makes  a  hit  with 
his  "  Mutt  and  Jeff."  For  a  few  months  every- 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

body  smiles  and  then  comes  the  long  oblivion. 
The  more  permanent  American  humor  has 
commonly  been  written  by  persons  who  were 
almost  unconscious,  not  indeed  of  the  fact  that 
they  were  creating  humorous  characters,  but 
unconscious  of  the  effort  to  provoke  a  laugh. 
The  smile  lasts  longer  than  the  laugh.  Perhaps 
that  is  the  secret.  One  smiles  as  one  reads  the 
delicate  sketches  of  Miss  Jewett.  One  smiles 
over  the  stories  of  Owen  Wister  and  of  Thomas 
Nelson  Page.  The  trouble,  possibly,  with  the 
enduring  qualities  of  the  brilliant  humorous 
stories  of  "O.  Henry"  was  that  they  tempt 
the  reader  to  laugh  too  much  and  to  smile  too 
little.  When  one  reads  the  Legend  of  Sleepy 
Hollow  or  Diedricb  Knickerbocker's  History  of 
New  Tork,  it  is  always  with  this  gentle  part 
ing  of  the  lips,  this  kindly  feeling  toward  the 
author,  his  characters  and  the  world.  A  humor 
ous  page  which  produces  that  effect  for  gener 
ation  after  generation,  has  thestamp  of  literature. 
One  may  doubt  whether  even  the  extraordi 
nary  fantasies  of  Mark  Twain  are  more  suc 
cessful,  judged  by  the  mere  vulgar  test  of  con 
crete  results,  than  the  delicate  humor  of  Charles 
Lamb.  Our  current  newspaper  and  magazine 
[  202  ] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

humor  is  in  no  respect  more  fascinating  than 
in  its  suggestion  as  to  the  permanent  effect 
iveness  of  its  comic  qualities.  Who  could  say, 
when  he  first  read  Mr.  Finley  P.  Dunne's 
"  Mr.  Dooley "  sketches,  whether  this  was 
something  that  a  whole  nation  of  readers  would 
instantly  and  instinctively  rejoice  over,  would 
find  a  genial  revelation  of  American  character 
istics,  would  recognize  as  almost  the  final  word 
of  kindly  satire  upon  our  overworked,  over 
excited,  over-anxious,  over-self-conscious  gen 
eration? 

The  range  of  this  contemporary  newspaper 
and  magazine  humor  is  well-nigh  universal,  — 
always  saving,  it  is  true,  certain  topics  or  states 
of  mind  which  the  American  public  cannot 
regard  as  topics  for  laughter.  With  these  few 
exceptions  nothing  is  too  high  or  too  low  for 
it.  The  paragraphers  joke  about  the  wheel 
barrow,  the  hen,  the  mule,  the  mother-in-law, 
the  President  of  the  United  States.  There  is 
no  ascending  or  descending  scale  of  import 
ance.  Any  of  the  topics  can  raise  a  laugh.  If 
one  examines  a  collection  of  American  paro 
dies,  one  will  find  that  the  happy  national  talent 
for  fun-making  finds  full  scope  in  the  parody 
[  203  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

and  burlesque  of  the  dearest  national  senti 
ments.  But  no  one  minds;  everybody  believes 
that  the  sentiments  endure  while  the  jokes  will 
pass.  The  jokes,  intended  as  they  are  for  an 
immense  audience,  necessarily  lack  subtlety. 
They  tend  to  partake  of  the  methods  of  pic 
torial  caricature.  Indeed,  caricature  itself,  as 
Bergson  has  pointed  out,  emphasizes  those 
"automatic,  mechanical-toy"  traits  of  charac 
ter  and  behavior  which  isolate  the  individual 
and  make  him  ill  adapted  for  his  function  in 
society.  Our  verbal  wit  and  humor,  no  less 
than  the  pencil  of  our  caricaturists,  have  this 
constant  note  of  exaggeration.  "  These  vio 
lent  delights  have  violent  ends."  But  during 
their  brief  and  laughing  existence  they  serve 
to  normalize  society.  They  set  up,  as  it  were, 
a  pulpit  in  the  street  upon  which  the  comic 
spirit  may  mount  and  preach  her  useful  ser 
mon  to  all  comers. 

Despite  the  universality  of  the  objects  of 
contemporary  American  humor,  despite,  too, 
its  prevalent  method  of  caricature,  it  remains 
true  that  its  character  is,  on  the  whole,  clean, 
eas^-^going,  and  kindly.  The  old  satire  of  hatred 
has  lost  its  force.  No  one  knows  why.  "  Satire 
[  204  ] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

has  grown  weak/'  says  Mr.  Chesterton, "  pre 
cisely  because  belief  has  grown  weak."  That 
is  one  theory.  The  late  Henry  D.  Lloyd,  of 
Chicago,  declared  in  one  of  his  last  books: 
"  The  world  has  outgrown  the  dialect  and  tem 
per  of  hatred.  The  style  of  the  imprecatory 
psalms  and  the  denunciating  prophets  is  out  of 
date.  No  one  knows  these  times  if  he  is  not 
conscious  of  this  change/'  That  is  another 
theory.  Again,  party  animosities  are  surely 
weaker  than  they  were.  Caricatures  are  less  per 
sonally  offensive;  if  you  doubt  it,  look  at  any 
of  the  collections  of  caricatures  of  Napoleon, 
or  of  George  the  Fourth.  Irony  is  less  often 
used  by  pamphleteers  and  journalists.  It  is  a 
delicate  rhetorical  weapon,  and  journalists  who 
aim  at  the  great  public  are  increasingly  afraid 
to  use  it,  lest  the  readers  miss  the  point.  In 
the  editorials  in  the  Hearst  newspapers,  for 
instance,  there  is  plenty  of  invective  and  in 
nuendo,  but  rarely  irony:  it  might  not  be  un 
derstood,  and  the  crowd  must  not  be  left  in 
doubt. 

Possibly  the  old-fashioned  satire  has  dis 
appeared  because  the  game  is  no  longer  consid 
ered  worth  the  candle.  To  puncture  the  tire  of 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

pretence  is  amusing  enough  ;  but  it  is  useless  to 
stick  tacks  under  the  steam  road-roller:  the 
road-roller  advances  remorselessly  and  smooths 
down  your  mischievous  little  tacks  and  you 
too,  indifferently.  The  huge  interests  of  poli 
tics,  trade,  progress,  override  your  passion 
ate  protest.  "  Shall  gravitation  cease  when  you 
go  by  ?"  I  do  not  compare  Colonel  Roosevelt 
with  gravitation,  but  have  all  the  satirical  squibs 
against  our  famous  contemporary,  from  the 
"Alone  in  Cubia"  to  the  "Teddy-see,"  ever 
cost  him,  in  a  dozen  years,  a  dozen  votes? 

Very  likely  Mr.  Lloyd  and  Mr.  Chesterton 
are  right.  We  are  less  censorious  than  our  an 
cestors  were.  ftVmericans,  on  the  whole,  try  to 

A/avoid  giving  pain  through  speech}  The  sat 
irists  of  the  golden  age  loved  that  cruel  exer 
cise  of  power.  Perhaps  we  take  things  less 
seriously  than  they  did  ;  undoubtedly  our  at 
tention  is  more  distracted  and  dissipated.  At 
any  rate,  the  American  public  finds  it  easier  to 
forgive  and  forget,  than  to  nurse  its  wrath  to 
keep  it  warm.  Our  characteristic  humor  of 

v    understatement,  and  our  equally  characteristic 
humor  of  overstatement,  are  both  likely  to  be 
cheery  at  bottom,  though  the  mere  wording 
[  206  ] 


HUMOR  AND  SATIRE 

may  be  grim  enough.  No  popular  saying  is 
more  genuinely  characteristic  of  American  hu 
mor  than  the  familiar  "Cheer  up.  The  worst 
is  yet  to  come." 

Whatever  else  one  may  say  or  leave  unsaid 
about  American  humor,  every  one  realizes  that 
it  is  a  fundamentally  necessary  reaction  from 
the  pressure  of  our  modern  living.  Perhaps  it 
is  a  handicap.  Perhaps  we  joke  when  we  should 
be  praying.  Perhaps  we  make  fun  when  we 
ought  to  be  setting  our  shoulders  to  the  wheel. 
But  the  deeper  fact  is  that  most  American 
shoulders  are  set  to  the  wheel  too  often  and 
too  long,  and  if  they  do  not  stop  for  the  joke 
they  are  done  for.  I  have  always  suspected 
that  Mr.  Kipling  was  thinking  of  American 
humor  when  he  wrote  in  his  well-known  lines 
on  "The  American  Spirit'* :  — 

"  So  imperturbable  he  rules 

Unkempt,  disreputable,  vast  — 
And  in  the  teeth  of  all  the  schools 
I  —  I  shall  save  him  at  the  last.'* 

That  is  the  very  secret  of  the  American  sense 
of  humor :  the  conviction  that  something  is 
going  to  save  us  at  the  last.  Otherwise  there 
would  be  no  joke!  It  is  no  accident,  surely, 
[  207  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

that  the  man  who  is  increasingly  idolized  as  the 
most  representative  of  all  Americans,  the  bur 
den-bearer  of  his  people,  the  man  of  sorrows 
and  acquainted  with  grief,  should  be  our  most 
inveterate  humorist.  Let  Lincoln  have  his  story 
and  his  joke,  for  he  had  faith  in  the  saving  of 
the  nation;  and  while  his  Cabinet  are  waiting 
impatiently  to  listen  to  his  Proclamation  of 
Emancipation,  give  him  another  five  minutes 
to  read  aloud  to  them  that  new  chapter  by 
Artemus  Ward. 


VI 

Individualism  and 
Fellowship 

IT  would  be  difficult  to  find  a  clearer  expres 
sion  of  the  old  doctrine  of  individualism  than 
is  uttered  by  Carlyle  in  his  London  lecture  on 
"The  Hero  as  Man  of  Letters."  Listen  to  the 
grim  child  of  Calvinism  as  he  fires  his  "  Annan- 
dale  grapeshot "  into  that  sophisticated  London 
audience :  "  Men  speak  too  much  about  the 
world.  .  .  .  The  world's  being  saved  will  not 
save  us  ;  nor  the  world's  being  lost  destroy  us. 
We  should  look  to  ourselves.  .  .  .  For  the 
saving  of  the  world  I  will  trust  confidently  to 
the  Maker  of  the  world ;  and  look  a  little  to  my 
own  saving,  which  I  am  more  competent  to  ! " 
Carlyle  was  never  more  soundly  Puritanic, 
never  more  perfectly  within  the  lines  of  the 
moral  traditions  of  his  race  than  in  these  in 
junctions  to  let  the  world  go  and  to  care  for 
the  individual  soul. 

[  209  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

We  are  familiar  with  the  doctrine  on  this 
side  of  the  Atlantic.  Here  is  a  single  phrase 
from  Emerson's  journal  of  September,  1833, 
written  on  his  voyage  home  from  that  mem 
orable  visit  to  Europe  where  he  first  made 
Carlyle's  acquaintance.  "  Back  again  to  my 
self,"  wrote  Emerson,  as  the  five-hundred-ton 
sailing  ship  beat  her  way  westward  for  a  long 
month  across  the  stormy  North  Atlantic  :  — 
"Back  again  to  myself. — A  man  contains  all 
that  is  needful  to  his  government  within  him 
self.  He  is  made  a  law  unto  himself.  All  real 
good  or  evil  that  can  befall  him  must  be  from 
himself.  .  .  .  The  purpose  of  life  seems  to  be 
to  acquaint  a  man  with  himself." 

In  the  following  August  he  is  writing:  — 

"  Societies,  parties,  are  only  incipient  stages, 
tadpole  states  of  men,  as  caterpillars  are  social, 
but  the  butterfly  not.  The  true  and  finished 
man  is  ever  alone." 

On  March  23,  1835:  — 

"  Alone  is  wisdom.  Alone  is  happiness. 
Society  nowadays  makes  us  low-spirited, 
hopeless.  Alone  is  Heaven." 

And  once  more  :  — 

"  If  ^Eschylus  is  that  man  he  is  taken  for, 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

he  has  not  yet  done  his  office  when  he  has  edu 
cated  the  learned  of  Europe  for  a  thousand 
years.  He  is  now  to  approve  himself  a  master 
of  delight  to  me.  If  he  cannot  do  that,  all  his 
fame  shall  avail  him  nothing.  I  were  a  fool  not 
to  sacrifice  a  thousand  /Eschyluses  to  my  in 
tellectual  integrity." 

These  quotations  have  to  do  with  the  per 
sonal  life.  Let  me  next  illustrate  the  individ 
ualism  of  the  eighteen-thirties  by  the  attitude 
of  two  famous  individualists  toward  the  prosaic 
question  of  paying  taxes  to  the  State.  Carlyle 
told  Emerson  that  he  should  pay  taxes  to  the 
House  of  Hanover  just  as  long  as  the  House 
of  Hanover  had  the  physical  force  to  collect 
them,  —  and  not  a  day  longer. 

Henry  Thoreau  was  even  more  recalcitrant. 
Let  me  quote  him  :  — 

"  I  have  paid  no  poll  tax  for  six  years.  I  was 
put  into  a  jail  once  on  this  account,  for  one 
night ;  and,  as  I  stood  considering  the  walls  of 
solid  stone,  two  or  three  feet  thick,  the  door 
of  wood  and  iron,  a  foot  thick,  and  the  iron 
grating  which  strained  the  light,  I  could  not 
help  being  struck  with  the  foolishness  of  that 
institution  which  treated  me  as  if  I  were  mere 

[211    ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

flesh  and  blood  and  bones,  to  be  locked  up.  I 
wondered  that  it  should  have  concluded  at 
length  that  this  was  the  best  use  it  could  put 
me  to,  and  had  never  thought  to  avail  itself  of 
my  services  in  some  way.  I  saw  that,  if  there 
was  a  wall  of  stone  between  me  and  my  towns 
men,  there  was  a  still  more  difficult  one  to  climb 
or  break  through  before  they  could  get  to  be  as 
free  as  I  was.  I  did  not  for  a  moment  feel  con 
fined,  and  the  walls  seemed  a  great  waste  of  stone 
and  mortar.  I  felt  as  if  I  alone  of  all  my  towns 
men  had  paid  my  tax.  They  plainly  did  not 
know  how  to  treat  me,  but  behaved  like  per 
sons  who  are  underbred.  In  every  threat  and 
in  every  compliment  there  was  a  blunder;  for 
they  thought  that  my  chief  desire  was  to  stand 
on  the  other  side  of  that  stone  wall.  I  could  not 
but  smile  to  see  how  industriously  they  locked 
the  door  on  my  meditations,  which  followed 
them  out  again  without  let  or  hindrance,  and 
they  were  really  all  that  was  dangerous.  As  they 
could  not  reach  me,  they  had  resolved  to  pun 
ish  my  body  ;  just  as  boys,  if  they  cannot  come 
at  some  person  against  whom  they  have  a  spite, 
will  abuse  his  dog.  I  saw  that  the  State  was 
half-witted,  that  it  was  timid  as  a  lone  woman 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

with  her  silver  spoons,  and  that  it  did  not  know 
its  friends  from  its  foes,  and  I  lost  all  my  re 
maining  respect  for  it,  and  pitied  it." 

Here  is  Thoreau's  attitude  toward  the  pro 
blems  of  the  inner  life.  The  three  quotations 
are  from  his  Walden  :  — 

"  Probably  I  should  not  consciously  and  de 
liberately  forsake  my  particular  calling  to  do 
the  good  which  society  demands  of  me,  to  save 
the  universe  from  annihilation." 

"  I  went  to  the  woods  because  I  wished  to 
live  deliberately,  to  front  only  the  essential 
facts  of  life,  and  see  if  I  could  not  learn  what 
it  had  to  teach,  and  not,  when  I  came  to  die, 
discover  that  I  had  not  lived.  I  did  not  wish 
to  live  what  was  not  life,  living  is  so  dear;  nor 
did  I  wish  to  practice  resignation,  unless  it  was 
quite  necessary.  I  wanted  to  live  deep  and  suck 
out  all  the  marrow  of  life,  to  live  so  sturdily 
and  Spartan-like  as  to  put  to  rout  all  that  was 
not  life,  to  cut  a  broad  swath  and  shave  close, 
to  drive  life  into  a  corner,  and  reduce  it  to  its 
lowest  terms,  and,  if  it  proved  to  be  mean,  why 
then  to  get  the  whole  and  genuine  meanness 
of  it,  and  publish  its  meanness  to  the  world ; 
or  if  it  were  sublime,  to  know  it  by  experience, 

[213  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

and  be  able  to  give  a  true  account  of  it  in  my 
next  excursion." 

"  It  is  said  that  the  British  Empire  is  very 
large  and  respectable,  and  that  the  United  States 
are  a  first-rate  power.  We  do  not  believe  that 
a  tide  rises  and  falls  behind  every  man  which 
can  float  the  British  Empire  like  a  chip,  if  he 
should  ever  harbor  it  in  his  mind." 

All  of  these  quotations  from  Emerson  and 
Thoreau  are  but  various  modes  of  saying  "  Let 
the  world  go."  Everybody  knows  that  in  later 
crises  of  American  history,  both  Thoreau  and 
Emerson  forgot  their  old  preaching  of  indi 
vidualism,  or  at  least  merged  it  in  the  larger 
doctrine  of  identification  of  the  individual  with 
the  acts  and  emotions  of  the  community.  And 
nevertheless  as  men  of  letters  they  habitually 
laid  stress  upon  the  rights  and  duties  of  the 
private  person.  Upon  a  hundred  brilliant  pages 
they  preached  the  gospel  that  society  is  in  con 
spiracy  against  the  individual  manhood  of  every 
one  of  its  members. 

They  had  a  right  to  this  doctrine.  They  came 
by  it  honestly  through  long  lines  of  ancestral 
heritage.  The  republicanism  of  the  seventeenth 
century  in  the  American  forests^as  well  as  upon 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

the  floor  of  the  English  House  of  Commons, 
had  asserted  that  private  persons  had  the  right 
to  make  and  unmake  kings.  The  republican 
theorists  of  the  eighteenth  century  had  insisted 
that  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness 
were  the  birthright  of  each  individual.  This 
doctrine  was  related,  of  course,  to  the  doctrine 
of  equality.  If  republicanism  teaches  that  "  I 
am  as  good  as  others,"  democracy  is  forever 
hinting  "Others  areas  good  as  I."  Democracy 
has  been  steadily  extending  the  notion  of  rights 
and  duties.  The  first  instinct,  perhaps,  is  to 
ask  what  is  right,  just,  lawful,  for  me  ?  Next, 
what  is  right,  just,  lawful  for  my  crowd?  That 
is  to  say,  my  family,  my  clan,  my  race,  my  coun 
try.  The  third  instinct  bids  one  ask  what  is 
right  and  just  and  lawful,  not  merely  for  me, 
and  for  men  like  me,  but  for  everybody.  And 
when  we  get  that  third  question  properly  an 
swered,  we  can  afford  to  close  school-house  and 
church  and  court-room,  for  this  world's  work 
will  have  ended. 

We  have  already  glanced  at  various  phases 
of  colonial  individualism.  We  have  had  a 
glimpse  of  Cotton  Mather  prostrate  upon  the 
dusty  floor  of  his  study,  agonizing  now  for 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

himself  and  now  for  the  countries  of  Europe  ; 
we  have  watched  Jonathan  Edwards  in  his 
solitary  ecstasies  in  the  Northampton  and  the 
Stockbridge  woods;  we  have  seen  Franklin 
preaching  his  gospel  of  personal  thrift  and  of 
getting  on  in  the  world.  Down  to  the  very 
verge  of  the  Revolution  the  American  pioneer 
spirit  was  forever  urging  the  individual  to  fight 
for  his  own  hand.  Each  boy  on  the  old  farms 
had  his  own  chores  to  do;  each  head  of  a  fam 
ily  had  to  plan  for  himself.  The  most  tragic 
failure  of  the  individual  in  those  days  was  the 
poverty  or  illness  which  compelled  him  to  "go 
on  the  town."  To  be  one  of  the  town  poor  in 
dicated  that  the  individualistic  battle  had  been 
fought  and  lost.  No  one  ever  dreamed,  ap 
parently,  that  a  time  for  old-age  pensions  and 
honorable  retiring  funds  was  coming.  The  feel 
ing  against  any  form  of  community  assistance 
was  like  the  bitter  hatred  of  the  workhouse 
among  English  laborers  of  the  eighteen-forties. 
The  stress  upon  purely  personal  qualities 
gave  picturesqueness,  color,  and  vigor  to  the 
early  life  of  the  United  States.  Take  the  per 
sons  whom  Parkman  describes  in  his  Oregon 
iL  They  have  the  perfect  clearness  of  out- 
[216] 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

line  of  the  portraits  by  Walter  Scott  and  the 
great  Romantic  school  of  novelists  who  loved 
to  paint  pictures  of  interesting  individual  men. 
There  is  the  same  stress  upon  individualistic 
portraiture  in  Irving's  Astoria;  in  the  humor 
ous  journals  of  early  travellers  in  the  Southern 
States.  It  is  the  secret  of  the  curiosity  with 
which  we  observe  the  gamblers  and  miners  and 
stage-drivers  described  by  Bret  Harte.  In  the 
rural  communities  of  to-day,  in  the  older  por 
tions  of  the  country,  and  in  the  remoter  settle 
ments  of  the  West  and  Southwest,  the  indi 
vidual  man  has  a  sort  of  picturesque,  and,  as  it 
were,  artistic  value,  which  the  life  of  cities  does 
not  allow.  The  gospel  of  self-reliance  and  of 
solitude  is  not  preached  more  effectively  by 
the  philosophers  of  Concord  than  it  is  by  the 
backwoodsmen,  the  spies,  and  the  sailors  of 
Fenimore  Cooper.  Individualism  as  a  doctrine 
of  perfection  for  the  private  person  and  indi 
vidualism  as  a  literary  creed  have  thus  gone 
hand  in  hand.  "  Produce  great  persons,  the  rest 
follows/'  cried  Walt  Whitman.  He  was  think 
ing  at  the  moment  about  American  society  and 
politics.  But  he  believed  that  the  same  law  held 
good  in  poetry.  Once  get  your  great  man  and 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

let  him  abandon  himself  to  poetry  and  the 
great  poetry  will  be  the  result.  It  was  almost 
precisely  the  same  teaching  as  in  Carlyle's  lec 
ture  on  "The  Hero  as  Poet." 

Well,  it  is  clear  enough  nowadays  that  both 
Whitman  and  Carlyle  underrated  the  value  of 
discipline.  The  lack  of  discipline  is  the  chief 
obstacle  to  effective  individualism.  The  pri 
vate  person  must  be  well  trained,  or  he  cannot 
do  his  work ;  and  as  civilization  advances,  it 
becomes  exceedingly  difficult  to  train  the  indi 
vidual  without  social  cooperation.  A  Paul  or  a 
Mahomet  may  discipline  his  own  soul  in  the 
Desert  of  Arabia ;  he  may  there  learn  the  les 
sons  that  may  later  make  him  a  leader  of  men. 
But  for  the  average  man  and  indeed  for  most 
of  the  exceptional  men,  the  path  to  effective 
ness  lies  through  social  and  professional  dis 
cipline.  Here  is  where  the  frontier  stage  of  our 
American  life  was  necessarily  weak.  We  have 
seen  that  our  ancestors  gained  something,  no 
doubt,  from  their  spirit  of  unconventionality 
and  freedom.  But  they  also  lost  something 
through  their  dislike  for  discipline,  their  indif 
ference  to  criticism,  their  ineradicable  tendency, 
whether  in  business,  in  diplomacy,  in  art  and 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

letters  and  education,  to  go  "across  lots."  A 
certain  degree  of  physical  orderliness  was,  in 
deed,  imposed  upon  our  ancestors  by  the  condi 
tions  of  pioneer  life.  The  natural  prodigality 
and  recklessness  of  frontier  existence  was  here 
and  there  sharply  checked.  Order  is  essential 
in  a  camp,  and  the  thin  line  of  colonies  was 
all  camping.  A  certain  instinct  for  order  under 
lay  that  resourcefulness  which  impresses  every  » 
reader  of  our  history.  Did  the  colonist  need  a 
tool  ?  He  learned  to  make  it  himself.  Isola 
tion  from  the  mother  country  was  a  stimulus 
to  the  inventive  imagination.  Before  long  they 
were  maintaining  public  order  in  the  same 
ingenious  fashion  in  which  they  kept  house. 
Appeals  to  London  took  too  much  time.  "  We 
send  a  complaint  this  year,'*  ran  the  saying, 
"the  next  year  they  send  to  inquire,  the  third 
year  the  ministry  is  changed."  No  wonder  that 
resourcefulness  bred  independent  action,  stim 
ulated  the  Puritan  taste  for  individualism,  and 
led  the  way  to  self-government. 

Yet  who  does  not  know  that  the  inherent 
instinct  for  political  order  may  be  accompanied 
by  mental  disorderlinessP  Even  your  modern 
Englishman  —  as  the  saying  goes  —  "muddles 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

through.'*  The  minds  of  our  American  fore 
fathers  were  not  always  lucid.  The  mysticism 
of  the  New  England  Calvinists  sometimes  bred 
fanaticism.  The  practical  and  the  theoretical 
were  queerly  blended.  The  essential  unorder- 
liness  of  the  American  mind  is  admirably  illus 
trated  by  that  "  Father  of  all  the  Yankees," 
Benjamin  Franklin.  No  student  of  Franklin's 
life  fails  to  be  impressed  by  its  happy  casual- 
ness,  its  cheerful  flavor  of  the  rogue-romance. 
Gil  Bias  himself  never  drifted  into  and  out  of 
an  adventure  with  a  more  offhand  and  imper 
turbable  adroitness.  Franklin  went  through  life 
with  the  joyous  inventiveness  of  the  amateur. 
He  had  the  amateur's  enthusiasm,  coupled  with 
a  clairvoyant  penetration  into  technical  prob 
lems  such  as  few  amateurs  have  possessed.  With 
all  of  his  wonderful  patience  towards  other  men, 
Franklin  had  in  the  realm  of  scientific  experi 
ment  something  of  the  typical  impatience  of 
the  mere  dabbler.  He  was  inclined  to  lose  in 
terest  in  the  special  problem  before  it  was  worked 
out.  His  large,  tolerant  intelligence  was  often 
as  unorderly  as  his  papers  and  accounts.  He 
was  a  wonderful  colonial  Jack-of-all-trades ; 
with  a  range  of  suggestion,  a  resourcefulness, 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

a  knack  of  assimilation,  a  cosmopolitan  many- 
sidedness,  which  has  left  us  perpetually  his  debt 
ors.  Under  different  surroundings,  and  disci 
plined  by  a  more  severe  and  orderly  training, 
Franklin  might  easily  have  developed  the  very 
highest  order  of  professional  scientific  achieve 
ment.  His  natural  talent  for  organization  of 
men  and  institutions,  his  "  early  projecting  pub 
lic  spirit,"  his  sense  of  the  lack  of  formal  edu 
cational  advantages  in  the  colonies,  made  him 
the  founder  of  the  Philadelphia  Academy,  the 
successful  agitator  for  public  libraries.  Acade 
micism,  even  in  the  narrow  sense,  owes  much  to 
this  LL.D.  of  St.  Andrews,  D.C.L.  of  Oxford, 
and  intimate  associate  of  French  academicians. 
But  one  smiles  a  little,  after  all,  to  see  the  bland 
printer  in  this  academic  company :  he  deserves 
his  place  there,  indeed,  but  he  is  something 
more  and  other  than  his  associates.  He  is  the 
type  of  youthful,  inexhaustible  colonial  Amer 
ica;  reckless  of  precedent,  self-taught,  splen 
didly  alive ;  worth,  to  his  day  and  generation,  a 
dozen  born  academicians ;  and  yet  suggesting 
by  his  very  imperfections,  that  the  Americans 
of  a  later  day,  working  under  different  condi 
tions,  are  bound  to  develop  a  sort  of  profes- 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

sional  skill,  of  steady,  concentrated,  ordered  in 
tellectual  activity,  for  which  Franklin  possessed 
the  potential  capacity  rather  than  the  opportu 
nity  and  the  desire. 

Yet  there  were  latent  lines  of  order,  hints  and 
prophecies  of  a  coming  fellowship,  running 
deep  and  straight  beneath  the  confused  surface 
of  the  preoccupied  colonial  conciousness.  In  an 
other  generation  we  see  the  rude  Western  de 
mocracy  asserting  itself  in  the  valley  of  the  Mis 
sissippi.  This  breed  of  pioneers,  like  their 
fathers  on  the  Atlantic  coast  line,  could  turn 
their  hands  to  anything,  because  they  must. 
"The  average  man,"  says  Mr.  Herbert  Croly, 
"  without  any  special  bent  or  qualifications,  was 
in  the  pioneer  states  the  useful  man.  In  that 
country  it  was  sheer  waste  to  spend  much  en 
ergy  upon  tasks  which  demanded  skill,  pro 
longed  experience,  high  technical  standards,  or 
exclusive  devotion.  .  .  .  No  special  equipment 
was  required.  The  farmer  was  obliged  to  be  all 
kinds  of  a  rough  mechanic.  The  business  man 
was  merchant,  manufacturer,  and  storekeeper. 
Almost  everybody  was  something  of  a  poli 
tician.  The  number  of  parts  which  a  man  of 
energy  played  in  his  time  was  astonishingly 
[  222  ] 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

large.  Andrew  Jackson  was  successively  a  law- ' 
y  er,  j  udge,  planter,  merchant,  general,  politician, 
and  statesman ;  and  he  played  most  of  these 
parts  with  conspicuous  success.  In  such  a  so 
ciety  a  man  who  persisted  in  one  job,  and  who 
applied  the  most  rigorous  and  exacting  stand 
ards  to  his  work,  was  out  of  place  and  really  in 
efficient.  His  finished  product  did  not  serve  its 
temporary  purpose  much  better  than  did  the 
current  careless  and  hasty  product,  and  his 
higher  standards  and  peculiar  ways  constituted 
an  implied  criticism  on  the  easy  methods  of  his 
neighbors.  He  interfered  with  the  rough  good- 
fellowship  which  naturally  arises  among  a  group 
of  men  who  submit  good  naturedly  and  uncriti 
cally  to  current  standards.  It  is  no  wonder,  con 
sequently,  that  the  pioneer  Democracy  viewed 
with  distrust  and  aversion  the  man  with  a  spe 
cial  vocation  and  high  standards  of  achieve 


ment." 


The  truth  of  this  comment  is  apparent  to 
everybody.  It  explans  the  still  lingering  popu 
lar  suspicion  of  the  "academic"  type  of  man. 
But  we  are  likely  to  forget  that  back  of  all  that 
easy  versatility  and  reckless  variety  of  effort 
there  was  some  sound  and  patient  and  construe- 

] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

tive  thinking.  Lincoln  used  to  describe  himself 
humorously,  slightingly,  as  a  "mast-fed  "  law 
yer,  one  who  had  picked  up  in  the  woods  the 
scattered  acorns  of  legal  lore.  It  was  a  true 
enough  description,  but  after  all,  there  were 
very  few  college-bred  lawyers  in  the  Eighth  Illi 
nois  Circuit  or  anywhere  else  who  could  hold 
their  own,  even  in  a  purely  professional  strug 
gle,  with  that  long-armed  logician  from  the 
backwoods. 

There  was  once  a  "  mast-fed  "  novelist  in 
this  country,  who  scandalously  slighted  his 
academic  opportunities,  went  to  sea,  went  into 
the  navy,  went  to  farming,  and  then  went  into 
novel-writing  to  amuse  himself.  He  cared  no 
thing  and  knew  nothing  about  conscious  liter 
ary  art;  his  style  is  diffuse,  his  syntax  the 
despair  of  school-teachers,  and  many  of  his 
characters  are  bores.  But  once  let  him  strike 
the  trail  of  a  story,  and  he  follows  it  like  his 
own  Hawkeye ;  put  him  on  salt  water  or  in  the 
wilderness,  and  he  knows  rope  and  paddle,  axe 
and  rifle,  sea  and  forest  and  sky  ;  and  he  knows 
his  road  home  to  the  right  ending  of  a  story 
by  an  instinct  as  sure  as  an  Indian's.  Profes 
sional  novelists  like  Balzac,  professional  critics 
[  224  ] 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

like  Sainte-Beuve,  stand  amazed  at  Fenimore 
Cooper's  skill  and  power.  The  true  engineer 
ing  and  architectural  lines  are  there.  They 
were  not  painfully  plotted  beforehand,  like 
George  Eliot's.  Cooper  took,  like  Scott, "the 
easiest  path  across  country,"  just  as  a  bee- 
hunter  seems  to  take  the  easiest  path  through 
the  woods.  But  the  bee-hunter,  for  all  his  ap 
parent  laziness,  never  loses  sight  of  the  air- 
drawn  line,  marked  by  the  homing  bee;  and 
jour  Last  of  the  Mohicans  will  be  instinctively, 
inevitably  right,  while  your  Daniel  Deronda 
will  be  industriously  wrong. 

Cooper  literally  builded  better  than  he  knew. 
Obstinately  unacademic  in  his  temper  and 
training,  he  has  won  the  suffrages  of  the  most 
fastidious  and  academic  judges  of  excellence  in 
his  profession.  The  secret  is,  I  suppose,  that 
the  lawlessness,  the  amateurishness,  the  indif 
ference  to  standards  were  on  the  surface,  —  ap 
parent  to  everybody,  —  the  soundness  and 
rightness  of  his  practice  were  unconscious. 

Franklin  and  Lincoln  and  Cooper,  there 
fore,  may  be  taken  as  striking  examples  of  in 
dividuals  trained  in  the  old  happy-go-lucky 
way,  and  yet  with  marked  capacities  for  social- 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

ization,  for  fellowship.  They  succeeded,  even 
by  the  vulgar  tests  of  success,  in  spite  of  their 
lack  of  discipline.  But  for  most  men  the  chief 
obstacle  to  effective  labor  even  as  individuals 
is  the  lack  of  thoroughgoing  training. 

It  is  scarcely  necessary  to  add  that  there  are 
vast  obstacles  in  the  way  of  individualism  as  a 
working  theory  of  society.  Carlyle's  theory  of 
"  Hero  Worship  "  has  fewer  adherents  than 
for  half  a  century.  It  is  picturesque,  —  that 
conception  of  a  great,  sincere  man  and  of  a 
world  reverencing  him  and  begging  to  be  led 
by  him.  But  the  difficulty  is  that  contempo 
rary  democracy  does  not  say  to  the  Hero,  as 
Carlyle  thought  it  must  say,  "Govern  me !  I  am 
mad  and  miserable,  and  cannot  govern  myself!  " 

Democracy  says  to  the  Hero,  "  Thank  you 
very  much,  but  this  is  our  affair.  Join  us,  if 
you  like.  We  shall  be  glad  of  your  company. 
But  we  are  not  looking  for  governors.  We 
propose  to  govern  ourselves." 

Even  from  the  point  of  view  of  literature 
and  art,  —  fields  of  activity  where  the  individ 
ual  performer  has  often  been  felt  to  be  quite 
independent  of  his  audience,  —  it  is  quite  evi 
dent  nowadays  that  the  old  theory  of  individ- 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

ualism  breaks  down.  Even  your  lyric  poet, 
who  more  than  any  other  artist  stands  or  sings 
alone,  falls  easily  into  mere  lyric  eccentricity 
if  he  is  not  bound  to  his  fellows  by  wholesome 
and  normal  ties.  In  fact,  this  lyric  eccentricity, 
weakness,  wistfulness,  is  one  of  the  notable  de 
fects  of  American  poetry.  We  have  always  been 
lacking  in  the  more  objective  forms  of  literary 
art,  like  epic  and  drama.  Poe,  and  the  imita 
tors  of  Poe,  have  been  regarded  too  often  by 
our  people  as  the  normal  type  of  poet.  One 
must  not  forget  the  silent  solitary  ecstasies 
that  have  gone  into  the  making  of  enduring 
lyric  verse,  but  our  literature  proves  abun 
dantly  how  soon  sweetness  may  turn  to  an 
Emily  Dickinson  strain  of  morbidness;  how 
fatally  the  lovely  becomes  transformed  into  the 
queer.  The  history  of  the  American  short  . 
story  furnishes  many  similar  examples.  The 
artistic  intensity  of  a  Hawthorne,  his  ethical 
and  moral  preoccupations,  are  all  a  part  of  the 
creed  of  individualistic  art.  But  both  Haw 
thorne  and  Poe  would  have  written,  —  one  dare 
not  say  better  stories,  but  at  least  greater  and 
broader  and  more  human  stories,  —  if  they 
had  not  been  forced  to  walk  so  constantly  in 
C  227  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

solitary  pathways.  That  fellowship  in  artistic 
creation  which  has  characterized  some  of  the 
greatest  periods  of  art  production  was  some 
thing  wholly  absent  from  the  experience  of 
these  gifted  and  lonely  men.  Even  Emerson 
and  Thoreau  wrote  "whim"  over  their  portals 
more  often  than  any  artist  has  the  privilege  to 
write  it.  Emerson  never  had  any  thorough 
training,  either  in  philosophy,  theology,  or 
history.  He  admits  it  upon  a  dozen  smiling 
pages.  Perhaps  it  adds  to  his  purely  personal 
charm,  just  as  Montaigne's  confession  of  his  in 
tellectual  and  moral  weaknesses  heightens  our 
fondness  for  the  Prince  of  Essayists.  But  the 
deeper  fact  is  that  not  only  Emerson  and  Tho 
reau,  Poe  and  Hawthorne,  but  practically  every 
American  writer  and  artist  from  the  beginning 
has  been  forced  to  do  his  work  without  the  sus 
taining  and  heartening  touch  of  national  fel 
lowship  and  pride.  Emerson  himself  felt  the 
chilling  poverty  in  the  intellectual  and  emo 
tional  life  of  the  country.  He  betrays  it  in  this 
striking  passage  from  his  Journal,  about  the 
sculptor  Greenough: — 

"  What  interest  has  Greenough  to  make  a 
good  statue  ?  Who  cares  whether  it  is  good  ? 

228 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

A  few  prosperous  gentlemen  and  ladies;  but 
the  Universal  Yankee  Nation  roaring  in  the 
capitol  to  approve  or  condemn  would  make  his 
eye  and  hand  and  heart  go  to  a  new  tune." 

Those  words  were  written  in  1836,  but  we 
are  still  waiting  for  that  new  national  anthem, 
sustaining  the  heart  and  the  voice  of  the  indi 
vidual  artist.  Yet  there  are  signs  that  it  is  com 
ing. 

It  is  obvious  that  the  day  for  the  old  indi 
vidualism  has  passed.  Whether  one  looks  at 
art  and  literature  or  at  the  general  activities  of 
American  society,  it  is  clear  that  the  isolated  in 
dividual  is  incompetent  to  carry  on  his  neces 
sary  tasks.  This  is  not  saying  that  we  have 
outgrown  the  individual.  We  shall  never  out 
grow  the  individual.  We  need  for  every  page 
of  literature  and  for  every  adequate  perform 
ance  of  society  more  highly  perfected  individ 
uals.  Some  one  said  of  Edgar  Allan  Poe  that 
he  did  not  know  enough  to  be  a  great  poet. 
All  around  us  and  every  day  we  find  individ 
uals  who  do  not  know  enough  for  their  speci 
fic  job  ;  men  who  do  not  love  enough,  men  in 
whom  the  power  of  will  is  too  feeble.  Such 
men,  as  individuals,  must  know  and  love  and 
[  229  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

will  more  adequately ;  and  this  not  merely  to 
perfect  their  functioning  as  individuals,  but  to 
fulfill  their  obligations  to  contemporary  soci 
ety.  A  true  spiritual  democracy  will  never  be 
reached  until  highly  trained  individuals  are 
united  in  the  bonds  of  fraternal  feeling.  Every 
individual  defect  in  training,  defect  in  aspira 
tion,  defect  in  passion,  becomes  ultimately  a 
defect  in  society. 

(Let  us  turn,  then,  to  those  conditions  of 
American  society  which  have  prepared  the  way 
for,  and  foreshadowed,  a  more  perfect  fellow 
ship.  We  shall  instantly  perceive  the  relation 
of  these  general  social  conditions  to  the  speci 
fic  performances  of  our  men  of  letters.  We  have 
repeatedly  noted  that  our  most  characteristic 
literature  is  what  has  been  called  a  citizen  liter 
ature.  It  is  the  sort  of  writing  which  springs 
from  a  sense  of  the  general  needs  of  the  com 
munity  and  which  has  had  foritsobject  the  safe 
guarding  or  the  betterment  of  the  community. 
Aside  from  a  few  masterpieces  of  lyric  poetry, 
and  aside  from  the  short  story  as  represented 
by  such  isolated  artists  as  Poe  and  Hawthorne, 
our  literature  as  a  whole  has  this  civic  note.  It 
may  be  detected  in  the  first  writings  of  the 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

colonists.  Captain  John  Smith's  angry  order 
at  Jamestown,  "  He  that  will  not  work  neither 
let  him  eat,"  is  one  of  the  planks  in  the  plat 
form  of  democracy.  Under  the  trying  and  de 
pressing  conditions  of  that  disastrous  settle 
ment  at  Eden  in  Martin  Cbuzzlewit  it  is  the 
quick  wits  and  the  brave  heart  of  Mark  Tap- 
ley  which  prove  him  superior  to  his  employer. 
The  same  sermon  is  preached  in  Mr.  Barrie's 
play,  T'be  Admirable  Crichton :  cast  away  upon 
the  desert  island,  the  butler  proves  himself  a 
better  man  than  his  master.  This  is  the  mo 
tive  of  a  very  modern  play,  but  it  may  be  il 
lustrated  a  hundred  times  in  the  history  of  the 
seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries  in  Amer 
ica.  The  practical  experiences  of  the  colonists 
confirmed  them  in  their  republican  theories.  It 
is  true  that  they  held  to  a  doctrine  of  religious 
and  political  individualism.  But  the  moment 
these  theories  were  put  to  work  in  the  wilder 
ness  a  new  order  of  things  decreed  that  this  in 
dividualism  should  be  modified  in  the  direction 
of  fellowship.  Calvinism  itself,  for  all  of  its  in 
sistence  upon  the  value  of  the  individual  soul, 
taught  also  the  principle  of  the  equality  of  all 
souls  before  God.  It  was  thus  that  the  Insti- 

[331  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

tutes  of  Calvin  became  one  of  the  charters  of 
democracy.  The  democratic  drift  in  the  writ 
ings  of  Franklin  and  Jefferson  is  too  well  known 
to  need  any  further  comment.  The  triumph 
of  the  rebellious  colonists  of  1776  was  a  tri 
umph  of  democratic  principles  ;  and  although 
a  Tory  reaction  came  promptly,  although  H am- 
iltonianism  came  to  stay  as  a  beneficent  check 
to  over-radical,  populistic  theories,  the  history 
of  the  last  century  and  a  quarter  has  abundantly 
shown  the  vitality  and  the  endurance  of  demo 
cratic  ideas. 

One  may  fairly  say  that  the  decade  in  which 
American  democracy  revealed  its  most  ugly 
and  quarrelsome  aspect  was  the  decade  of  the 
eighteen-thirties.  That  was  the  decade  when 
Washington  Irvingand  Fenimore  Cooper  came 
home  from  long  sojurns  in  Europe.  They 
found  themselves  confronted  at  once  by  sensi 
tive,  suspicious  neighbors  who  hated  England 
and  Europe  and  had  a  lurking  or  open  hostil 
ity  towards  anything  thatsavored  of  Old  World 
culture.  Yet  in  that  very  epoch  when  English 
visitors  were  passing  their  most  harsh  and  cen 
sorious  verdict  upon  American  culture,  Emer 
son  was  writing  in  his  Journal  (June  18, 1834) 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

a  singular  prophecy  to  the  effect  that  the  evils 
of  our  democracy,  so  far  as  literature  was  con 
cerned,  were  to  be  cured  by  the  remedy  of 
more  democracy.  Is  it  not  striking  that  he  turns 
away  from  the  universities  and  the  traditional 
culture  of  New  England  and  looks  towards  the 
Jacksonism  of  the  new  West  to  create  a  new 
and  native  American  literature  ?  Here  is  the 
passage :  — 

"  We  all  lean  on  England ;  scarce  a  verse, 
a  page,  a  newspaper,  but  is  writ  in  imitation  of 
English  forms;  our  very  manners  and  conver 
sation  are  traditional,  and  sometimes  the  life 
seems  dying  out  of  all  literature,  and  this 
enormous  paper  currency  of  Words  is  accepted 
instead.  I  suppose  the  evil  may  be  cured  by 
this  rank  rabble  party,  the  Jacksonism  of  the 
country,  heedless  of  English  and  of  all  liter 
ature  —  a  stone  cut  out  of  the  ground  without 
hands  ;  —  they  may  root  out  the  hollow  dilet 
tantism  of  our  cultivation  in  the  coarsest  way, 
and  the  new-born  may  begin  again  to  frame 
their  own  world  with  greater  advantage." 

From  that  raw  epoch  of  the  eighteen-thirties 
on  to  the  Civil  War,  one  may  constantly  detect 
in  American  writing  the  accents  of  democratic 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

radicalism.  Partly,  no  doubt,  it  was  a  heritage 
of  the  sentiment  of  the  French  Revolution. 
"  My  father/'  said  John  Greenleaf  Whittier, 
"really  believed  in  the  Preamble  of  the  Bill  of 
Rights,  which  re-affirmed  the  Declaration  of 
Independence."  So  did  the  son  !  Equally  clear 
in  the  writings  of  those  thirty  years  are  echoes 
of  the  English  radicalism  which  had  so  much 
in  common  with  the  democratic  movement 
across  the  English  Channel.  The  part  which 
English  thinkers  and  English  agitators  played 
in  securing  for  America  the  fruits  of  her  own 
democratic  principles  has  never  been  ade 
quately  acknowledged. 

That  the  outcome  of  the  Civil  War  meant 
a  triumph  of  democratic  ideas  as  against  aristo 
cratic  privilege,  no  one  can  doubt.  There  were 
no  stancher  adherents  of  the  democratic  idea 
than  our  intellectual  aristocrats.  The  best 
Union  editorials  at  the  time  of  the  Civil  War, 
says  James  Ford  Rhodes,  were  written  by  schol 
ars  like  Charles  Eliot  Norton  and  James  Russell 
Lowell.  I  think  it  was  Lowell  who  once  said, 
in  combatting  the  old  aristocratic  notion  of 
white  man  supremacy,  that  no  gentleman  is 
willing  to  accept  privileges  that  are  inaccessible 

[  234  ] 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

to  other  men.  This  is  precisely  like  the  famous 
sentence  of  Walt  Whitman  which  first  arrested 
the  attention  of "  Golden  Rule  Jones,"  the 
mayor  of  Toledo,  and  which  made  him  not 
'only  a  Whitmaniac  for  the  rest  of  his  life  but 
one  of  the  most  useful  of  American  citizens. 
The  line  was,  "  I  will  accept  nothing  which  all 
may  not  have  their  counterpart  of  on  the  same 
terms." 

ji  This  instinct  of  fellowship  cannot  be  sepa 
rated,  of  course,  from  the  older  instincts  of 
righteousness  and  justice.  It  involves,  how 
ever,  more  than  giving  the  other  man  his  due. 
It  means  feeling  towards  him  as  towards  an 
other  "  fellow."  It  involves  the  sentiment  of 
partnership.  Historians  of  early  mining  life  in 
California  have  noted  the  new  phase  of  social 
feeling  in  the  mining-camps  which  followed 
upon  the  change  from  the  pan  —  held  and 
shaken  by  the  solitary  miner  —  to  the  cradle, 
which  required  the  cooperation  of  at  least  two 
men.  It  was  when  the  cradle  came  in  that  the 
miners  first  began  to  say  "  partner."  As  the 
cradle  gave  way  to  placer  mining,  larger  and 
larger  schemes  of  cooperation  came  into  use.  ? 
In  fact,  Professor  Royce  has  pointed  out  in  his 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

History  of  California  that  the  whole  lesson  of 
California  history  is  precisely  the  lesson  most 
necessary  to  be  learned  by  the  country  as  a 
whole,  namely,|fthat  the  phase  of  individual 
gain-getting  and  individualistic  power  always 
leads  to  anarchy  and  reaction,  and  that  it 
becomes  necessary,  even  in  the  interests  of 
effective  individualism  itself,  to  recognize  the 
compelling  and  ultimate  authority  of  society. 
What  went  on  in  California  between  1849 
and  1852  is  precisely  typical  of  what  is  going 
on  everywhere  to-day.  American  men  and 
women  are  learning,  as  we  say,  "  to  get  to 
gether."  It  is  the  distinctly  twentieth-century 
programme.  We  must  all  learn  the  art  of  get 
ting  together,  not  merely  to  conserve  the  in 
terests  of  literature  and  art  and  society,  but 
to  preserve  the  individual  himself  in  his  just 
rights.  Any  one  who  misunderstands  the  depth 
and  the  scope  of  the  present  political  restless 
ness  which  is  manifested  in  every  section  of  the 
country,  misunderstands  the  American  instinct 
for  fellowship.  It  is  a  law  of  that  fellowship 
that  what  is  right  and  legitimate  for  me  is  right 
and  legitimate  for  the  other  fellow  also.  The 
American  mind  and  the  American  conscience 

[236  ] 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

are  becoming  socialized  before  our  very  eyes. 
American  art  and  literature  must  keep  pace 
with  this  socialization  of  the  intelligence  and 
the  conscience,  or  they  will  be  no  longer  repre 
sentative  of  the  true  America. 

Literary  illustrations  of  this  spirit  of  frater- 
nalism  lie  close  at  hand.  They  are  to  be  found 
here  and  there  even  in  the  rebellious,  well-nigh 
anarchic,  individualism  of  the  Concord  men. 
They  are  to  be  found  throughout  the  prose 
and  verse  of  Whittier.  No  one  has  preached 
a  truer  or  more  effective  gospel  of  fellowship 
than  Longfellow,  whose  poetry  has  been  one 
of  the  pervasive  influences  in  American  demo 
cracy,  although  J^ongfellow  had  but  little  to 
say  about  politics  and  never  posed  in  a  slouch 
hat  and  with  his  trousers  tucked  into  his  boots. 
Fellowship  is  taught  in  the  Biglow  Papers  of 
Lowell  and  the  stories  of  Mrs.  Stowe.  It  is 
wholly  absent  from  the  prose  and  verse  of  Poe, 
and  it  imparts  but  a  feeble  warmth' to  the  del 
icately  written  pages  of  Hawthorne.  But  in  the 
books  written  for  the  great  common  audience 
of  American  men  and  women,  like  the  novels 
of  Winston  Churchill ;  and  in  the  plays  which 
have  scored  the  greatest  popular  successes,  like 

[  23?  ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

those  of  Denman  Thompson,  Bronson  How 
ard,  Gillette,  Augustus  Thomas,  the  doctrine  of 
fellowship  is  everywhere  to  be  traced.  It  is  in 
the  poems  of  James  Whitcomb  Riley  and  of 
Sam  Walter  Foss ;  in  the  work  of  hundreds  of 
lesser  known  writers  of  verse  and  prose  who 
have  echoed  Foss's  sentiment  about  living  in 
a  "  house  by  the  side  of  the  road  "  and  being 
a  "friend  of  man." 

[j  To  many  readers  the  supreme  literary  ex 
ample  of  the  gospel  of  American  fellowship 
is  to  be  found  in  Walt  Whitman.  One  will 
look  long  before  one  finds  a  more  consistent 
or  a  nobler  doctrine  of  fellowship  than  is 
chanted  in  Leaves  of  Grass.  tJLt-is  based  upon 
individualism ;  the  strong  body  and  the  pos 
sessed  soul,  sure  of  itself  amid  the  whirling  of 
the  "  quicksand  years  "  ;  but  it  sets  these  strong 
persons  upon  the  "open  road"  in  comrade 
ship  ;  it  is  the  sentiment  of  comradeship  which 
creates  the  indissolubleunion  of"  these  States  "; 
and  the  States,  in  turn,  in  spite  of  every 
"alarmist,"  "  partialist,"  or  "infidel,"  are  to 
stretch  out  unsuspicious  and  friendly  hands  of 
fellowship  to  the  whole  world.^jAnybody  has 
the  right  to  call  Leaves  of  Gfass  poor  poetry, 

[  238   ] 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

if  he  pleases  ;  but  nobody  has  the  right  to  deny 
its  magnificent  AmericanisnO 

It  is  not  merely  in  literature  that  this  mes 
sage  of  fellowship  is  brought  to  our  generation. 
Let  me  quote  a  few  sentences  from  the  recent 
address  of  George  Gray  Barnard,  the  sculptor, 
in  explaining  the  meaning  of  his  marble  groups 
now  placed  at  the  entrance  to  the  Capitol 
of  Pennsylvania.  "  I  resolved,"  says  Barnard, 
"  that  I  would  build  such  groups  as  should 
stand  at  the  entrance  to  the  People's  temple 
.  .  .  the  home  of  those  visions  of  the  ever-wid 
ening  and  broadening  brotherhood  that  gives 
to  life  its  dignity  and  its  meaning.  Life  is  told 
in  terms  of  labor.  It  is  fitting  that  labor,  its  tri 
umphs,  its  message,  should  be  told  to  those 
who  gaze  upon  a  temple  of  the  people.  The 
worker  is  the  hope  of  all  the  future.  The  needs 
of  the  worker,  his  problems,  his  hopes,  his  un 
told  longings,  his  sacrifices,  his  triumphs,  all 
of  these  are  the  field  of  the  art  of  the  future. 
Slowly  we  are  groping  our  way  towards  the  new 
brotherhood,  and  when  that  day  dawns,  men 
will  enter  a  world  made  a  paradise  by  labor. 
Labor  makes  us  kin.  It  is  for  this  reason  that 
there  has  been  placed  at  the  entrance  of  this 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

great  building  the  message  of  the  Adam  and 
Eve  of  the  future,  the  message  of  labor  and  of 
fraternity." 

That  there  are  defects  in  this  gospel  and 
programme  of  American  fellowship,  every  one 
is  aware.  If  the  obstacle  to  effective  individual 
ism  is  lack  of  discipline,  the  obstacles  to  effect 
ive  fellowship  are  vagueness,  crankiness,  in 
efficiency,  and  the  relics  of  primal  selfishness. 
Nobody  in  our  day  has  preached  the  tidings 
of  universal  fellowship  more  fervidly  and  pow 
erfully  than  Tolstoi.  Yet  when  one  asks  the 
great  Russian, "  What  am  I  to  do  as  a  member 
of  this  fellowship  ?  "  Tolstoi  gives  but  a  con 
fused  and  impractical  answer.  He  applies  to 
the  complex  and  contradictory  facts  of  our 
contemporary  civilization  the  highest  test  and 
standard  known  to  him :  namely,  the  prin 
ciples  of  the  New  Testament.  But  if  you  ask 
him  precisely  how  these  principles  are  to  be 
made  the  working  programme  of  to-morrow, 
the  Russian  mysticism  and  fanaticism  settle 
over  him  like  a  fog.  We  pass  Tolstoians  on 
the  streets  of  our  American  cities  every  day ; 
they  have  the  eyes  of  dreamers,  of  those  who 
would  build,  if  they  could,  a  new  Heaven  and 
[  240  ] 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

a  new  Earth.  But  they  do  not  know  exactly 
how  to  go  about  it.  Our  practical  Western 
minds  seize  upon  some  actual  plan  for  con 
structive  labor.  Miss  Jane  Addams  organizes 
her  settlements  in  the  slums;  Booker  Wash 
ington  gives  his  race  models  of  industrial  edu 
cation;  President  Eliot  has  a  theory  of  univer 
sity  reform  and  then  struggles  successfully  for 
forty  years  to  put  that  theory  into  practice. 
Compared  with  the  concrete  performance  of 
such  social  workers  as  these,  the  gospel  accord 
ing  to  Whitman  and  Tolstoi  is  bound  to  seem 
vague  in  its  outlines,  and  ineffective  in  its  con 
crete  results.  That  such  a  gospel  attracts  cranks 
and  eccentrics  of  all  sorts  is  not  to  be  wondered 
at.  They  come  and  go, (but  the  deeper  con 
ceptions  of  fraternalism  remain\ 

A  further  obstacle  to  the  progress  of  fellow 
ship  lies  in  selfishness.  But  let  us  see  how  even 
the  coarser  and  rawer  and  cruder  traits  of  the 
American  character  may  be  related  to  the 
spirit  of  common  endeavor  which  is  slowly 
transforming  our  society,  and  modifying,  be 
fore  our  eyes,  our  contemporary  art  and  liter 
ature. 

"  The  West,"  says  James  Bryce,  "  is  the 

C  *4i   ] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

most  American  part  of  America,  that  is  to  say 
the  part  where  those  features  which  distinguish 
America  from  Europe  come  out  in  the  strong 
est  relief."  We  have  already  noted  in  our  study 
of  American  romance  how  the  call  of  the  West 
represented  for  a  while  the  escape  from  reality. 
The  individual,  following  that  retreating  hori 
zon  which  we  name  the  West,  found  an  escape 
from  convention  and  from  social  law.  Beyond 
the  Mississippi  or  beyond  the  Rockies  meant 
to  him  that  "  somewheres  east  of  Suez  "  where 
the  Ten  Commandments  are  no  longer  to  be 
found,  where  the  individual  has  free  rein.  But 
by  and  by  comes  the  inevitable  reaction,  the 
return  to  reality.  The  pioneer  sobers  down  ; 
he  finds  that  "  the  Ten  Commandments  will  not 
budge";  he  sees  the  need  of  law  and  order;  he 
organizes  a  vigilance  committee  ;  he  impanels 
a  jury,  even  though  the  old  Spanish  law  does 
not  recognize  a  jury.  The  new  land  settles  to 
its  rest.  The  output  of  the  gold  mines  shrinks 
into  insignificance  when  compared  with  the  cash 
value  of  crops  of  hay  and  potatoes.  The  old 
picturesque  individualism  yields  to  a  new  so 
cial  order,  to  the  conception  of  the  rights  of 
the  state.  The  story  of  the  West  is  thus  an 

[  242  ] 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

epitome  of  the  individual  human  life  as  well  as 
the  history  of  the  United  States. 

We  have  been  living  through  a  period  where 
the  mind  of  the  West  has  seemed  to  be  the 
typical  national  mind.  We  have  been  indiffer 
ent  to  traditions.  We  have  overlooked  the  de 
fective  training  of  the  individual,  provided  he  * 
"  made  good."  We  have  often,  as  in  the  free 
silver  craze,  turned  our  back  upon  universal  I 
experience.  We  have  been  recklessly  deaf  to 
the  teachings  of  history ;  we  have  spoken  of  the 
laws  of  literature  and  art  as  if  they  were  mere 
conventions  designed  to  oppress  the  free  ac 
tivity  of  the  artist.  Typical  utterances  of  our 
writers  are  Jack  London's  "  I  want  to  get  away 
from  the  musty  grip  of  the  past,"  and  Frank 
Norris's  "  I  do  not  want  to  write  literature,  I 
want  to  write  life." 

The  soul  of  the  West,  and  a  good  deal  of 
the  soul  of  America,  has  been  betrayed  in  words 
like  those.  Not  to  share  this  hopefulness  of  the 
West,  its  stress  upon  feeling  rather  than  think 
ing,  its  superb  confidence,  is  to  be  ignorant  of 
the  constructive  forces  of  the  nation.  The  hu 
mor  of  the  West,  its  democracy,  its  rough  kind 
ness,  its  faith  in  the  people,  its  generous  notion 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 
I 

of"  the  square  deal  for  everybody,"  its  eleva 
tion  of  the  man  above  the  dollar,  are  all  typi 
cal  of  the  American  way  of  looking  at  the  world. 
Typical  also,  is  its  social  solidarity,  its  swift 
emotionalism  of  the  masses.  It  is  the  Western 
4  interest  in  the  ethical  aspect  of  social  move- 
I  ments  that  is  creating  some  of  the  moving  forces 
f  in  American  society  to-day.  Experiment  sta- 
•  tions  of  all  kinds  flourish  on  that  soil.  Chicago 
newspapers  are  more  alive  to  new  ideas  than 
the  newspapers  of  New  York  or  Boston.  No 
one  can  understand  the  present-day  America 
if  he  does  not  understand  the  men  and  women 
who  live  between  the  Allegheny  Mountains 
and  the  Rocky  Mountains.  They  have  worked 
out,  more  successfully  than  the  composite  pop- 
tulation  of  the  East,  a  general  theory  of  the 
relation  of  the  individual  to  society;  in  other 
words,  a  combination  of  individualism  with 
fellowship. 

To  draw  up  an  indictment  against  this  typi 
cal  section  of  our  country  is  to  draw  up  an  in 
dictment  against  our  people  as  a  whole.  And 
yet  one  who  studies  the  literature  and  art  pro 
duced  in  the  great  Mississippi  Valley  will  see, 
I  believe,  that  the  needs  of  the  West  are  the 
[  244  ] 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

real  needs  of  America.  Take  that  commonness 
of  mind  and  tone,  which  friendly  foreign  critics, 
from  De  Tocqueville  to  Bryce,  have  indicated 
as  one  of  the  dangers  of  our  democracy.  This 
commonness  of  mind  and  tone  is  often  one  of 
the  penalties  of  fellowship.  It  may  mean  a 
levelling  down  instead  of  a  levelling  up. 

Take  the  tyranny  of  the  majority,  —  to  which 
Mr.  Bryce  has  devoted  one  of  his  most  sug 
gestive  chapters.  You  begin  by  recognizing  the 
rights  of  the  majority.  You  end  by  believing 
that  the  majority  must  be  right.  You  cease  to 
struggle  against  it.  In  other  words,  you  yield 
to  what  Mr.  Bryce  calls  "  the  fatalism  of  the 
multitude."  The  individual  has  a  sense  of  in 
significance.  It  is  vain  to  oppose  the  general 
current.  It  is  easier  to  acquiesce  and  to  submit. 
The  sense  of  personal  responsibility  lessens. 
What  is  the  use  of  battling  for  one's  own  opin 
ions  when  one  can  already  see  that  the  multi 
tude  is  on  the  other  side  ?  The  greater  your 
democratic  faith  in  the  ultimate  Tightness  of 
the  multitude,  the  less  perhaps  your  individual 
power  of  will.  The  easier  is  it  for  you  to  be 
lieve  that  everything  is  coming  out  right,  whe 
ther  you  put  your  shoulder  to  the  wheel  or  not. 

[  *4S  1 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

\  The  problem  of  overcoming  these  evils  is 
nothing  less  than  the  problem  of  spiritualizing 
democracy.  There  are  some  of  our  hero-wor 
shipping  people  who  think  that  that  vast  result 
can  still  be  accomplished  by  harking  back  to 
some  such  programme  as  the  "  great  man " 
theory  of  Carlyle.  Another  theory  of  spiritu 
alizing  democracy,  no  less  familiar  to  the  stu 
dent  of  nineteen-century  literature,  is  what  is 
called  "the  divine  average"  doctrine  of  Walt 
Whitman.  The  average  man  is  to  be  taught 
the  glory  of  his  walk  and  trade.  Round  every 
head  there  is  to  be  an  aureole.  "  A  common 
wave  of  thought  and  joy,  lifting  mankind 
again,"  is  to  make  us  forget  the  old  distinction 
between  the  individual  and  the  social  group. 
We  are  all  to  be  the  sons  of  the  morning. 

We  must  not  pause  to  analyze  or  to  illus 
trate  these  two  theories.  Carlyle's  theory  seems 
to  me  to  be  outworn,  and  Whitman's  theory 
is  premature.  But  it  is  clear  that  they  both 
admit  that  the  mass  of  men  are  as  yet  incom 
pletely  spiritualized,  not  yet  raised  to  their  full 
stature.  Unquestionably,  our  American  life  is, 
in  European  eyes  at  least,  monotonously  uni 
form.  It  is  touched  with  self-complacency.  It 
[a46] 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

is  too  intent  upon  material  progress.  It  confuses 
bigness  with  greatness.  It  is  unrestful.  It  is 
marked  by  intellectual  impatience.  Our  authors 
are  eager  to  write  life  rather  than  literature.  But 
they  are  so  eager  that  they  overlook  the  need 
of  literary  discipline.  They  do  not  learn  to 
write  literature  and  therefore  most  of  them  are 
incapable  of  interpreting  life.  They  escape,  per 
haps,  from  "the  musty  grip  of  the  past/'  but 
in  so  doing  they  refuse  to  learn  the  inexorable 
lessons  of  the  past.  Hence  the  fact  that  our 
books  lack  power,  that  they  are  not  commen 
surate  with  the  living  forces  of  the  country. 
The  unconscious,  moral,  and  spiritual  life  of 
the  nation  is  not  back  of  them,  making  cc  eye 
and  hand  and  heart  go  to  a  new  tune." 

If  we  could  have  that,  we  should  ask  no 
more,  for  we  believe  in  the  nation.  I  heard  a 
doctor  say,  the  other  day,  that  a  man's  chief  les 
son  was  to  pull  his  brain  down  into  his  spinal 
cord  ;  that  is  to  say,  to  make  his  activities  not 
so  much  the  result  of  conscious  thought  and 
volition,  as  of  unconscious,  reflex  action;^ to 
stop  thinking  and  willing,  and  simply  do  what 
one  has  to  do.")  May  there  not  be  a  hint  here 
of  the  ultimate  relation  of  the  individual  to  the 

[>47] 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

social  organism  ;  the  relation  of  our  literature 
to  our  national  character?  There  is  a  period, 
no  doubt,  when  the  individual  must  painfully 
question  himself,  test  his  powers,  and  acquire 
the  sense  of  his  own  place  in  the  world.  But 
there  also  comes  a  more  mature  period  when  he 
takes  that  place  unconsciously^  does  his  work 
almost  without  thinking  about  it,  as  if  it  were 
not  his  work  at  ally  The  brain  has  gone  down 
into  the  spinal  cord ;  the  man  is  functioning  as 
apart  of  the  organism  of  society  ;  he  has  ceased 
to  question,  to  plan,  to  decide;  it  is  instinct 
that  does  his  work  for  him. 

Literature  and  art,  at  their  noblest,  function 
in  that  instinctive  way.  They  become  the  un 
conscious  expression  of  a  civilization.  A  na 
tion  passes  out  of  its  adolescent  preoccupation 
with  plans  and  with  materials.  It  learns  to  do 
its  work,  precisely  as  Goethe  bade  the  artist  do 
his  task,  without  talking  about  it.  We,  too, 
shall  outgrow  in  time  our  questioning,  our  self- 
analysis,  our  futile  comparison  of  ourselves 
with  other  nations,  our  self-conscious  study  of 
our  own  national  character.  We  shall  not  for 
get  the  distinction  between  "  each"  and  "  all," 
but "  all  "  will  increasingly  be  placed  at  the  ser- 


INDIVIDUALISM  AND  FELLOWSHIP 

vice  of  "  each. '\With  fellowship  based  upon 
individualism,  and  with  individualism  ever 
leading  to  fellowship,  America  will  perform 
its  vital  tasks,  and  its  literature  will  be  the 
unconscious  and  beautiful  utterance  of  its 
inner  life. 


THE    END, 


CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U    .    S    .   A 


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